À bout portant (Point Blank). Some movies do all the clichés right. Wrongful suspicion! A man in over his head! A woman in labor! Crooked cops! A chase on a complicated urban transit system! General ridiculousness! It all works. This movie reminded me of a great episode of a TV thriller–there’s not a ton of time for bullshit conversations and plot thickeners on your cellphones, so just go go go. There’s one chase scene in here that ends perfectly. It’s exactly what I would do.
Elaine in Seinfeld, Male Unbonding episode. I probably quote this more than anything I’ve ever seen on TV:
ELAINE: Come on, let’s go do something. I don’t want to just sit around here.
JERRY: Okay.
ELAINE: Want to go get something to eat?
JERRY: Where do you want to go?
ELAINE: I don’t care, I’m not hungry.
JERRY: We could go to one of those cappuccino places. They let you just sit there.
ELAINE: What are we gonna do there? Talk?
JERRY: We can talk.
ELAINE: I’ll go if I don’t have to talk.
File under: boredom, introverts.
The single worst argument Siskel and I ever had came after a coin flip, when we were unable to decide what we had been flipping for. We eventually had a two-out-of-three flip to settle the question of the original flip.
I dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes — all the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.
Michel Foucault (via viafrank). See also Clive James:
Whatever the subject, a real critic is a cultural critic, always: if your judgment doesn’t bring in more of the world than it shuts out, you shouldn’t start.
and Anthony Lane:
Of all the duties required of the professional critic, the least important—certainly the least enduring—is the verdict.
LEMMETWEETTHATFORYOU makes Twitter forgery simple and fast! Awesome. Don’t believe everything you see online, kids.
Raging Bull. I liked it more this time around than the first time I watched it. Something about seeing it on the big screen and with a crowd, it seemed much funnier. I still think the last half-hour or so is a trudge, but most biopics seem to be that way.
[Bach] says, in effect, yes this is bound to be boring but I am going to be so masterful that you will be in awe and not care even if you will be bored.
Jeremy Denk is a great writer. See also Denk on recording and photos of Glenn Gould during the March 1955 ‘Goldberg’ recording sessions collected by The Selvedge Yard.
More than 30 million Chinese people live in caves, many of them in Shaanxi province where the Loess plateau, with its distinctive cliffs of yellow, porous soil, makes digging easy and cave dwelling a reasonable option.
Wow! 30 million.
In China, millions make themselves at home in caves – latimes.com
Tucker & Dale vs Evil. The best genre satire embraces as much as it mocks. You could work your way down a checklist of clichés acknowledged and subverted. The two leads are really great, and some of the best moments come from their script, chemistry, and delivery. Worthwhile for sure.
TED2012 remixed: It’s Time for TED. This is hilarious. Filed under: bullshit. (via)
Real life is messy. And as a general rule, the more theatrical the story you hear, and the more it divides the world into goodies vs baddies, the less reliable that story is going to be. […] One of the central problems with narrative nonfiction is that the best narratives aren’t messy and complicated, while nonfiction nearly always is.
The Thin Red Line. I’ve now seen everything Terrence Malick has directed. I thought I’d like this one more. Concessions: it’s gorgeous, the hilltop battle is a masterpiece (I can’t think of any movie battle where you have such a feeling for the geography, the space they move in), the acting is top-notch.
The challenge he doesn’t quite meet here is in telling a story about humanity by letting everyone tell a human story. Badlands and Days of Heaven each had single narrators; this one has at least seven, just counting off from memory. That’s fine. Single narration isn’t a rule. I appreciate the experimentation. I just don’t think it works here. With a few exceptions, these guys almost always speak lofty Malickian. Which is also fine! I can understand an argument that this could be the Universal Voice of the Yearning Soul, or something. It just didn’t feel right to me because the language was too similar, as if it were one person with a handful of accents.
Wikipedia tells me that Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, Jason Patric, Viggo Mortensen and Mickey Rourke were all cast and filmed, but didn’t make it into the final edit. Incredible! I wonder if keeping these guys in, with their own voiceovers, could help balance the narration. Along with all the other actors who basically got cameos (Travolta, Clooney, Brody), could this be a movie that isn’t long enough? Dare I say it?
My Terrence Malick rankings:
I ranked this one dead last (close call), but note that Malick’s worst has still got a good lead over the median film. I think it’s safe to say he’s one of my favorite directors (up there with Eastwood and Buster Keaton). I’d probably say that based on Days of Heaven alone. Other movies I’ve seen.
If there are more stories about this, in-depth ones, I am afraid Glass is going to conclude We wanted to believe. That is going to be his deepest comment on this. I hope I’m wrong. I don’t agree with that assessment. I think the real problem is We wanted things to be simple.
Bin Laden’s biggest concern was al-Qaeda’s media image among Muslims. He worried that it was so tarnished that, in a draft letter probably intended for [Atiyah Abd al-Rahman], he argued that the organization should find a new name.
(via) See also William Gibson on terrorism PR:
You’re a small group with no reputation, and you start covertly blowing up or murdering the people of a big group, like a government or a nation-state or a whole race. And you can’t just do it and then go and do the next one. You have to do it, and then go and do your PR. “We just bombed your mall. It was us.” And then maybe you do it, and some other guys, these upstart assholes across town, are calling up the news and saying, “We did it! We bombed the mall!” So then you have to get your PR guy on the phone and say, “No, they’re full of shit. WE bombed the mall.” So it’s about branding to that extent.
If you look inward and concentrate only on your own desires all the time, you end up having fun some of the time, but a large amount of the time you’re miserable and another portion of the time you’re bored. I’d rather be attentive and curious all the time so I just keep my eyes and ears open to the world beyond myself.
Erased de Kooning Drawing by Robert Rauschenberg. (via)
Aliens. This is how you do a sequel. Extend, not rehash. It’s not as good as Alien, but few things are and it doesn’t need to be because it’s just as fun. The first was about trauma and violation and survival, this one about confrontation and closure. Ripley’s got a great arc. I’d always wished they’d done more with Bishop’s crawl down the tunnel. It’s one of the best shots in scifi, but then the story zips elsewhere and when you come back, Bishop is chillin’, remote-controlling a plane. I also love when Ripley makes her machine gun + motion tracker + flamethrower superweapon with duct tape. It’s the little things.
Vigilante Vigilante: The Battle for Expression. Some people get their thrills from graffiti/street art/etc., other people get their thrills from painting over other people’s graffiti/street art/etc. Hilarity ensues. I wish I was able to see this over at Cinefest today.
When you go to the cinema — the first two or three minutes of any film are amazing. Because the screen is so big. The scale. Directors can pretty much do anything for those first few minutes. It doesn’t matter how many films you see — it’s still kind of a moment.
Shame. Just like with Hunger, my interest rarely wavered but I’m not totally sure what to make of it. It felt odd that a movie that’s so vivid and unafraid is also so… conservative? I’d scrap the song scene, which is a fine performance but so, so dreary compared to the rest of the movie. Michael Fassbender is incredible, though (makes me even more excited for Prometheus). Carey Mulligan is also great, with the reservation that I like her role’s characterizing-Fassbender function much more than her plot function as the movie progresses. I’m pretty sure I’ll watch whatever Steve McQueen’s next movie is.
Mark Larson 