When I heard that the New York in the Movies Blogathon and the Self-Involvement Blogathon were happening around the same time, I got it into my head that there was one film I could write about that could legitimately fit on the nexus of both. Sure, there are “better” New York films––Manhattan, obvs, or even Metropolitan; there are films that would allow me to more deeply discuss my personal life, as the Culture Snob puts it, as it’s “filtered through movies.” But there’s no movie in any category or canon that allows me to talk about how my relationship to the city I live in has been filtered through movies since long before I lived here, quite like Ghostbusters. A close reading of the film, the way it depicts New York, and what that has to do with me, follows after the jump. The entire film is now available for streaming, but not embedding, on Hulu.
I don’t really know what the TakeApart blog means when they say, “with the times of today mirroring the times of the film, [Zabriskie Point] couldn’t be more relevant”––the movie’s such crazy hippie fantasy, I can’t imagine a time when it was ever relevant––but I’ll thank them for pointing to the clip of its beautiful but vacant stars sitting next to Rex Reed and Mel Brooks on The Dick Cavett Show.
Victoria Large at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, on David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s “outsourcing” of some of the shooting of Intimidad to their subjects: “The technique of allowing the subjects to help author their own story feels appropriate to Intimidad, not only because it allows for the intimacy of the title, but also because it reflects one of the most striking things about the film: that it is about those who take action and are not merely acted upon.”
David Hudson alerts us to the Invitation to the Dance blog-a-thon, which began at Marilyn Ferdinand’s blog yesterday. I’m thinking about taking a crack at how the dynamic of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers is inverted in Dirty Dancing, but I’m open to other suggestions if you’ve got any.
Todd at South Dakota Dark introduces the Superficial Blogathon, to take place February 1-8:
…sometimes, you just want to look at attractive people doing witty things. I mean, we’re all human!
You could write an extended treatise on a work where the superficial pleasures led you to a deeper understanding of the piece as a whole. Or you could make a list of people you find attractive. Or you could just post pretty pictures. So long as it has to do with something in the arts or pop culture and it’s something you enjoy on some sort of shallow level, it’s fair game.
Karina’s note to self: this is probably the perfect place for that piece you’ve been thinking about writing about the time you went to see Janeane Garofalo at Comix, and she solicited the audience for painkillers and eventually traded a girl sitting up front some kind of hand-beaded bracelet for a handful of Vicodin, which in turn prompted to you to ponder the allure of Reality Bites. Which, you should probably admit right now, you saw four times in the theater when you were 13, and which today, though totally cognizant of its faults, you still can’t really help but like a lot.
Above: John C. Reilly, in character as Dewey Cox, performs Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab.” I still think Walk Hard looks terrible, but I have to admit, he’s got the hip swivel down… [Via The Playlist]
OMG, it IS real! The A.V. Club taste tests Brawndo: “I can’t see slamming one of these, or even drinking more than one a year, but it beats the flavor of most energy drinks. And you’re doing your part to help the world of forgotten film with every can.”
Whitney at Pop Candy points out that Strange Culture, my favorite doc from Sundance 2007, is premiering on the Sundance Channel tonight at 9:35 ET. I’ve written about the film here and here.
When I first learned of Bob Westal’s Bob Fosse Blogathon, my plan was to write about Star 80, a film I’ve never seen but have long wanted to. I had ample time, in the ensuing month and a half, to track down a copy of Star 80 on DVD, watch it two or three times, and come up with oodles of brilliant ideas in relation to it.
But I didn’t. I lost track of time. I forgot. And I inevitably found myself wandering around the East Village on Saturday, looking everywhere but finding Star 80 nowhere. Even Kim’s on St. Marks, which has a full Fosse section on its DVD sales floor, didn’t have it. “These are supposed to be the spoils of living in New York,” I grumbled internally on the subway back to Queens. “My apartment is too small and my savings are non existant, but at the very least, if I want to buy something, I’m supposed to be able to find it.”
I wasn’t necessarily shit out of luck, re: the blogathon–I have a copy of Cabaret on my DVD shelf, I could have just written about that–but at some point on the way home I decided that my inability to find a copy of Star 80 was significant. It certainly said something about my own laziness, but it also speaks to the film’s lasting legacy. Made by an Oscar-winning director, based on a true story, featuring actors portraying debatably significant real-life figures such as Hugh Hefner and Peter Bogdanovich, Star 80 has nonetheless fallen into the dustbin of cinema history. Even YouTube, the crumb catcher for the toaster of forgotten pop culture, offers no help.
I don’t have any explanations. I haven’t even seen the movie. But I can ramble a bit after the jump.
“Comedy is pain and frustration and crushing embarrassment; in other words comedy is much like real life,” writes Dan Leo at NewCritics. His essay, Funny Ha Ha, is not about Andrew Bujalski’s film. It’s mostly about how “the whole trick is to go through the day suffering all one’s usual defeats and calamities and somehow to see yourself as a sitcom character, or, if you’re feeling really grandiose, like a big-screen funny person like Jack Black or Vince Vaughn or Ralph Fiennes.” It’s also about sex.
It’s all part of NewCritics’ Comedy Blogathon, which began yesterday, and continues through Saturday. The idea, according to the invitation email, is to answer the question, “What is the purest comedic moment you have ever experienced?” To participate, you can write your own post on your own blog, include a link to this post on NewCritics, and your entry will be sweept up into the madness. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet. I might just review Southland Tales–because if The Rock saying “pimps don’t commit suicide” isn’t pure comedy, I don’t know what is.
Your faithful blogger will likely be out for the afternoon working on a podcast. So here’s a batch of links to get you through the rest of the day:
“I do know that at this particular juncture in film history and film criticism, we who write about and care about films allow ourselves to be borne back ceaselessly into the past do so at our own peril.” Glenn Kenny questions his colleagues’ near-universal worship of Pauline Kael. Come for Kenny’s eye-rolling, stay for the unexpected Sonic Youth reference.
The Reeler has compiled the entries thus far in the Totally Unrelated Blogathon. My favorite so far: John Lichman’s story of working for Chris Matthews, for whom he once made “a delicious, chocolate cake with vanilla icing.”
Join Peter Knegt in saying Happy 36th Birthday to “the accidental beard of [his] boyhood,” Winona Ryder.
Girish has convinced me to buy and read Michel Marie’s The French New Wave: An Artistic School with his post on the “bloggable” ideas contained within.
When Stu first asked me to participate in this blogathon, he hadn’t picked a name yet, but in describing the concept, he used the word “fatigued” – as in, the whole point is to write about what we think about when writing about film has us fatigued. And it’s probably foolish for me to admit this, but not only am I familiar with that fatigue – I actually have a back-up plan to combat it. When the days get really long and/or it starts to feel like I have nothing left to say, a little voice in the back of my head says, “Just get through today, and if it’s still bad, you can always go back to selling cheese.” This seems to do the trick.
A week before the 2003 blackout, I moved to New York to go to grad school with a suitcase, a computer, and less than a thousand dollars to my name. I had never been here for longer than a weekend, and knew no one. I was 23 and had nowhere to live, and absolutely no idea how insane that was. I somehow talked my way into a $600 room in a loft in South Williamsburg with seven roommates. I needed a job immediately, and Dean and Deluca was hiring. I wanted to work at their pasta counter––I’d been making handmade pasta, badly, since before puberty, and wanted to get really good at it—but Dean and Deluca’s pasta counter was just an offshoot of their cheese counter, so if I wanted to do one, I had to do the other.
Over the next couple of years, I sold cheese, I waited tables (extremely poorly—I’m a clutz), and eventually went to work at an artisanal pasta factory. I was getting a full culinary education by day, and toiling in academia at night. I didn’t sleep much, and by the end of it, I was friendless and probably clinically insane. And of course, I romanticize it like crazy.
Friend of Spout Stu VanAirsdale has launched his first blogathon over at The Reeler. From now through November 1, Stu is inviting film bloggers to write posts on their film blogs about anything they like, so long as it’s not about “filmgoing, filmmaking, film criticism, film news or anything else film-related.” The idea, says Stu, “is to aggregate a collection of what we think about when we’re not thinking about film.” He’s posted the first entry. It’s about Dionne Warwick. I’m planning on posting an entry here on Friday. It’s going to be about cheese.
The music video is primarily a medium of close-ups and wide tableau, with very little in between. In its traditional, performative form, framing is designed to either be tight enough to confirm lipsynch accuracy, or far away enough to properly present multiple bodies in slickly choreographed motion.
I am convinced that no director of music videos has worked the close/wide divide better than David Fincher. To be fair, I haven’t seen Zodiac, but I could take or leave his previous five feature films. In my mind, Fincher reached his creative and technical peak between 1989-1990, when he was directing music videos for Paula Abdul, George Michael, Billy Idol and, most impressively, Madonna. Is any image filmed in 1990 more iconic than this frame, from Fincher’s video for Madonna’s “Vogue”?
Fincher’s best video works actually function in part as tribute to the very concept of the close-up glamour shot, and he reached his absolute peak using Madonna as a more-than-willing sponge for the visual detritus of the studio era. Three of his Madonna videos (”Vogue”, “Express Yourself” and “Oh Father”, all of which made the Top 15 of Slant Magazine’s Top 100 Greatest Music Videos list) are so good that even now, 18 years on, watching them occasionally sparks a tear in my eye. A fourth Madonna/Fincher collaboration, “Bad Girl”, is incredibly silly, but still compulsively watchable. Even in Fincher’s lesser works, it’s the close-ups that punch me in the gut. In terms of his Madonna videos, Fincher’s close-ups are the most intimate images of the star that we’ve ever known.
Notes on Fincher’s signature close-ups after the jump. …Read more
I’m finishing up an entry this morning on David Fincher’s music videos for the Close-Up Blogathon. While I’m working on that, here’s a round-up of some of my favorite entries from other bloggers thus-far. There’s a full list of all entries at The House Next Door, which you should definitely check out–I don’t know how it happens, but somehow some of these blogathons manage to attract a median level of insight and writing that’s miles ahead of the average film journal or magazine.
Hannah Frank on the problem of the close-up in animation: “[A]nimation confounds the whole notion of this blog-a-thon. There’s just not anything to be close to. And worse, when an animated film tries to get close, when it copies the patter of its live-action counterpart, it feels static and dull.”
“I am in love with Cabiria, a woman who does not exist,” Steven Boone confesses. “How did this happen?” He offers a list of “clues.” Number 4: “Whenever Fellini wants to give us a cheat-sheet glimpse into Cabiria’s heart, he goes to a medium close-up. Only at the very end does he unleash one of the deadliest tight close-ups in cinema.”
“In the Godardian spirit of making a movie as a critique/analysis of other movies,” Jim Emerson offers “a free-association visual essay/commentary on close-ups (with inserts, jump cuts, switchbacks, flashbacks, flash-forwards…) that got synapses firing in my brain as I flipped through shots in my memory — and my DVD collection.” Thanks to Jim for posting a Marlene Dietrich screencap that I’m going to use in my own Blogathon entry.
Maul of America looks at a rare (for Hitchcock) bit of “gratuitous gore” in The Birds, and Camille Paglia’s theory that the film ultimately illustrates “a war between nature and culture, with the irrational and primitive vanquishing human illusions.”
“He made three great musicals and two of them, Cabaretand All That Jazz, effectively retrofitted the musical for a generation skeptical of artifice, incorporating techniques from the European New Wave and even neorealism. He didn’t only do it first. He did it better than just about anyone, and, despite is fame, he remains under-appreciated as a filmmaker.” On November 10, Bob at Forward to Yesterday is sponsoring Fossethon, a blogathon dedicated to the work of director/dancer/choreographer Bob Fosse. We are so there. Above, you’ll find Fosse dancing in a clip from 1953’s The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, alongside Debbie Reynolds, Van Johnson and Barbara Ruick.
I have about 800 ideas for books that I’ll probably never write; one of them is acollection of case studies of films that initially flopped, only to be reclaimed as classics. In the same vein, via GreenCine Daily comes news of the Ambitious Failure blogathon. Beginning today and running through Sunday the 24th, the blogathon was initiated by William Speruzzi, who writes:
Pushing the limits of budget, creativity and patience can all be a bust in the end but that is in the eye of the beholder. Can hindsight work in a film\’s favor? Was the criticism deserved or misguided? What makes a film that aspires to reach beyond the boundaries of entertainment go down in flames? Who gets to determine its demise? What is an ambitious failure? That\’s what we\’re here to find out.
There are four entries up already, each approaching the concept of failure from a different angle. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 50 percent are so far concerned with films by Francis Ford Coppola: Ed Copeland takes on The Cotton Club (”Having not seen The Cotton Club in more than 20 years (and remembering it fondly), I suspected that it might fit the bill for an “ambitious failure.” Boy, was I right.”), while Speruzzi looks at Apocalypse Now (”The media was caught up in the great American malady of predicting failure before it actual happens, if not actually rooting for it.”). Paul Hackett’s entry is basically an industrial analysis of Phillip Noyce’s The Quiet American, citing Miramax’s reluctance to promote the film in the wake of 9/11 as the root of its failure. And while Alien 3 might have failed with audiences (and in the mind of director David Fincher), Ray DeRousse is ready to reclaim the sequel for its “powerful message, powerfully delivered.”
To contribute to the blogathon, check out the guidelines here. I think I’m going to do an entry on It’s Always Fair Weather, Stanley Donen’s super-dark sort-of sequel to On the Town.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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I’m finishing up an entry this morning on David Fincher’s music videos for the Close-Up Blogathon. While I’m working on that, here’s a round-up of some of my favorite entries from other bloggers thus-far. There’s a full list of all entries at 
