I have no idea what to do with Josh Fox’s Memorial Day, a sporadically engaging––but far too simple-minded to be as troubling as it wants to be––hypothetical slice-of-life which exists to explain away Abu Ghraib via spring break. It seems to be consensus that this is, at the very least, the ballsiest film at this festival, although it certainly has fewer defenders than detractors. I found it to be alternately mesmerizing, infuriating, boring and eye-rollingly facile. I think it fails as a narrative film, even as it occasionally stuns as a work of pure cinema. And yet, I don’t think it’s dismissable outright.

Executive produced by Michael Stipe, Memorial is the brainchild of a New York theater rabblerouser named Josh Fox, and is loosely based on his “traveling, site-specific theatre event” Death of Nations 1: The Comfort and Safety Of Your Own Home. Dressed in all in black with standard-issue hipster-lectual glasses, Fox rocked a frustrating evasiveness at the Q & A following the film’s CineVegas premiere; when asked to unpack his intentions, Fox responded, “I don’t really do that.” He did admit to being a tourist to the world his film depicts. “I’m from New York,” the first-time filmmaker said more than once, ultimately invoking an old Spaulding Gray line about living “off the coast of America.”

…Read more

• “If Iron Man was about America’s power overseas — specifically in Afghanistan, where much of the movie takes place — then the Incredible Hulk is about what happens to our soldiers when they come home,” writes Charlie Jane Anders in a long review at io9. It’s about the impossibility of transforming young men into “super-soldiers” and then expecting them to blend back in.” Related: Anders takes a look at superheroes who can’t have sex, including “Poor Rogue from the X-men. She’s got the cool Susan Sontag hair, and the leather jumpsuit, and the hot boyfriend… but she can never touch anyone.”
• Anders isn’t exactly ga-ga over New Hulk, but she calls Ang Lee’s version “disastrous.” At Bright Lights After Dark, Erich Kuersten vehemently disagrees. “Man, it’s a sad day on our bitterly defended-from-Galactacus earth when an Ang Lee Hulk film is just dismissed outright, and here it is a super and vastly underrated picture. Granted the CGI was a bit cartoony in the previews (I know I laughed at the time) but looked much better in real big screen life.”
• David Poland bottom lines it: “The truth is, for all its flaws, there is not a single frame of The Incredible Hulk that contains a fragment of the artistry that Ang Lee brought to Hulk. Of course, the film was too long and the psychodrama too thick for most people. But there was true aesthetic beauty. I hate to even pull this one out of the backpack, but Speed Racer? Genius in comparison. Every frame.”

“No tongue – my lipstick,” Diane Ladd’s conniving Marietta Fortune admonishes at the beginning of Wild at Heart, flirting with Harry Dean Stanton’s Johnnie Farragut, while perfectly setting the tone for the tantalizing sexual games to follow. Lynch’s typically bizarre noir contains one of the steamiest foreplay scenes ever to grace the indie screen. Strangely, this kinky non-sex scene involves not Laura Dern’s Lula and Nicolas Cage’s Sailor Ripley (whose love scenes are saturated with such hyper-real color and artistic angles as to overshadow the screwing), but the childlike Lula and Willem Dafoe’s greasy, so-creepy-he’s-charismatic Bobby Peru (”Just like the country,” he drawls, introducing himself to Lula and Sailor outside the hotel they’re all staying at, sliding snakelike into Wild at Heart nearly an hour and twenty minutes fashionably late). Dressed in black, sporting a Clark Gable moustache, Bobby’s the ultimate contrast to Dern’s big blonde hairdo, red lipstick painted, 20-year-old piece of mentally damaged white trash. That the episode doesn’t culminate in predictable fornication only proves that the iconoclastic director truly understands how to harness the power of the erotic chase––that is, that it’s hotter than the catch.

I first saw Wild at Heart on the big screen at a more innocent time in my life, when S&M conjured up only images of women wearing corsets and stilettos, bearing whips and canes. But seeing the above scene between Bobby and Lula hit a nerve in me, in fact several. It was the only time I can remember actually feeling embarrassed at the movies, voyeuristically observing this charged encounter onscreen. The characters were both fully dressed, no fucking was taking place – so why did I feel like I was witnessing the dirtiest hardcore porn?

Probably because I was. Bobby and Lula engage in a power play game which renders Lula stripped psychologically naked. Instead of tearing off each other’s clothes they’re clawing at each other’s psyches. The sexual act pales in comparison.

…Read more

Marnie is the film in the Hitchcock canon most guaranteed to rankle feminists.  Tippi Hedren plays the frigid, thieving titular character whose only hope for salvation is at the hands of strong, virile Mark Rutland, eagerly embodied by Sean Connery, who blackmails her into marrying him – and makes her enjoy his punishment.  Most Marnie enthusiasts answer accusations of misogyny by ducking under the director’s craft, as in “Yeah, Connery plays a sadistic hero – but look at the way Hitch frames the back of Hedren’s head!” – as if the plot needs to be apologized for, swept under the rug.

What neither the feminists nor cinephiles seem to appreciate is that Marnie is one of the greatest bondage and discipline (B&D in sadomasochistic parlance) pics of all time. Artfully disguised as a psychosexual thriller, Hitchcock’s classic is actually kin to The Story of O with Hedren’s O-like Marnie at the sole mercy of Sir Connery’s sexy daddy (think Sir Stephen), reduced to being trapped like a wild animal to be broken and trained, owned and cared for, eventually becoming Rutland’s wife/slave. This ain’t misogyny – it’s erotic art!

…Read more

Just a brief note to introduce you to a couple of new SpoutBlog contributors. You may have already noticed that Steven Boone (Big Media Vandalism/The House Next Door) has been popping up here and there for the past couple of weeks. He’s already he’s offered glimpses into the world of halfway house film festivals, a Hollywood production camped out at a Brooklyn housing project, and an alternate universe in which Michael Jackson is an activist filmmaker. Stay tuned for more of Steven every Friday.

Later today, we’ll be debuting a new column from Lauren Wissot, whose work you might have also read at The House Next Door, and/or The Reeler. Lauren, who will be tackling (no pun intended) sexual themes in indie and classic cinema every Wednesday, will begin with a revisionist take on Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie. We wanted to call her column “Art Films To Jerk Off To,” but in the end that might be too limiting––after all, who’s to say what qualifies as art?

So please join us in welcoming Lauren and Steven. We’re also looking for additional part-time columnists, so if you have a topic or a genre that you’re dying to explore in bloggy form week in and week out, do send Karina an email.

“Smell is very nostalgic.”

Sarah Jessica Parker is talking about her latest perfume. She’s also, indirectly, talking about her appeal, her brand, what she does for a living, the reason why an audience in the low triple digits (mostly female, mostly younger than the actress by a decade) has rushed to the Times Center on a Friday evening exactly four weeks before the premiere of the Sex and the City movie, to see her interviewed on stage by journalist William J. Carter. I was invited to the event as a member of the press; I accepted the invitation in the spirit of making an honest effort to learn something about why adult women find Parker and the Sex and the City phenomena appealing.

The two women sitting next to me, who breathlessly climbed over my legs a few minutes after the program began, left behind their own fragrance trail: hair products, manicures, menthol cigarettes and pink drinks. A surface-only snap-judgment says these women were a representative sample of those in attendance: young(ish), upper-middle-class, not particularly cosmopolitan but enthusiastic about both cosmopolitans and Cosmopolitan.

…Read more

• Tribeca reviews: Sita Sings the Blues (see trailer above), Somers Town, War, Inc
• Iron Man = Pure Sex, critics admit begrudgingly
• Scarlett Johansson sings, necks with Salmon Rushdie.
• Disney’s Miley Cyrus “outrage” is laughable
• Harmony Korine loves Patrick Swayze, Stepin Fetchit
• New episodes of Four Eyed Monsters
• How is Madonna a piece of trash? Let us count the ways…
• JD Salinger takes on Indiana Jones
• Alex Gibney takes on Eliot Spitzer
• Will iTunes kill DVD store culture? Is it already dead?
• Notes from ROFLcon
• Che is Jeff Wells’ latest obsession
  There will be no CGI in Land of the Lost. Related: Have machines killed our ability to believe?
• Trailers and adverts: Hancock, Gremlins for BT Group, The Burger and the King, Batman/The Dark Knight mashup
• On the podcast: Paranoia, as reflected in Strange Culture and No Country For Old Men
• Amy Winehouse gets of the pipe long enough to get on the mic.

The New York Daily News reports that just days after Disney tried to shame Vanity Fair and photographer Annie Leibovitz for releasing a photo of tween Disney Channel sensation Miley Cyrus wrapped in a bed sheet, it’s been revealed that the company is selling Disney underwear in China via billboards that show adolescent models wearing even less. A Disney spokesman claimed the Chinese ad “has caught us totally by surprise” –– which seems about as credible as the suggestion that the company had no idea what was happening on Leibovitz’s set. The shock shouldn’t be that Disney is selling sex; the shock should be that Disney is not only feigning shock, but that they’ve turned feigning shock into a business model.

…Read more

At the Guardian, Andrew Pulver laments the fall Derek Jarman (and the personal, high-art cinema he made and represented) from cinephile fashion. He blames this in part on the revival of the commercial British film industry:

One problem is the seismic shift of the cinematic landscape since Jarman’s death in 1994, the same year that saw the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral. One of Jarman’s main weapons had been that, in the Thatcher era, there was no one else putting out Britain-centred product so enthusiastically. His small-scale, personalised vision undoubtedly helped him survive the 1980s and, to some extent, prosper. But with the revival of the commercial end of the British film industry, the very people who most resented Jarman’s productivity regained the initiative. After his death, his cinematic influence virtually vanished.

The idea of Jarman as a “Britain-centred” filmmaker reminded me of one of the things I found most frustrating about Derek, Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton’s collaborative, impressionist doc on their late friend, which I saw at Sundance last month (Pulver mentions both Julien and Swinton but not the film, although I have to imagine this post was in part motivated by Derek’s premiere this week in Berlin).

…Read more