The House Next Door

1. "Forgotten Films: The Dion Brothers (aka The Gravy Train) (dir. Jack Starrett, 1974)": Bilge Ebiri writes on a forgotten film co-written by Terrence Malick.

["Jack Starrett’s loser crime comedy The Dion Brothers (aka The Gravy Train) has built up enough of a cult following that it’s a slight misnomer to call it a “forgotten” film. After all, it’s been featured as part of the infamous Austin geek-out QT Fest, the Ain’t It Cool News-approved, Quentin Tarantino-programmed festival of cult flicks, and Starrett himself, an actor-cum-director who put his name to a number of cult flicks, including 1973’s Cleopatra Jones, has gained something of a reputation over the years. (Sadly, though, it’s been a posthumous one – he died in 1989 at the age of 52.) The Dion Brothers also holds added value for the average film buff, because its screenplay was co-written by Terrence Malick, who was reportedly also the original director of this film. (I can only assume he got the job after the critical success of Badlands.) Starrett replaced Malick, presumably sometime before production, and Malick’s credit now reads “David Whitney,” a pseudonym the reclusive writer-director has occasionally used."]

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2. "A Woman in Trouble is Rescued and Loved": House contributor Dan Callahan writes on INLAND EMPIRE for Bright Lights After Dark.

["Inland Empire was shot on consumer grade DV, and the surprise is how sumptuous it looks, with its dreamy dissolves, the red of Dern's lips bleeding into a huge ketchup stain on a white shirt, the blue of a desperate sex scene transforming Theroux's wasted face into a sort of Picasso painting on impotence. Lynch perches his camera right on people's faces for numerous close-ups, and the effect should be Ken Russell-grotesque, but it never is. Why? Difficult to say, except that the people seem to be shot with love and gentle concentration, as if the director was trying to find new ways to look at the human face, until the faces open up like flowers. Grace Zabriskie begins the film in dragon-lady mode, with a heavy accent (she's very funny), so that it has a huge impact when, hours later, we see her face again, and it suddenly seems disarmingly pretty, as if a mask has dropped away. And always there is Dern's face, that long landscape of nose and chin, like a giant high school prom queen just beginning to melt."]

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3. "Arctic Ice Retreat May Speed Up, Leaving Ice-Free Ocean by 2040": From Bloomberg.com

["Arctic sea-ice retreat is likely to accelerate so rapidly that the Arctic Ocean will be nearly ice- free by the summer by 2040, atmospheric scientists said. Further increases in the atmosphere of so-called greenhouse gases may lead to global warming that causes the already- retreating ice to begin melting four times faster in about 20 years' time, a team led by U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist Marika Holland says today in research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters."]

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4. "Oldest woman dies at age 116": From CNN.

["Elizabeth "Lizzie" Bolden, recognized as the world's oldest person, died early Monday, the administrator of the nursing home where she lived said Monday. She was 116. Bolden was born August 15, 1890, according to the Gerontology Research Group, a Los Angeles-based organization that tracks the ages of the world's oldest people. Guinness World Records recognized Bolden as the oldest person in August after the death of Maria Ester de Capovilla of Ecuador, who previously was listed as the oldest."]

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5. "Bringing new meaning to ‘firing blind’": Yes, well...

["The blind would be able to go hunting if a Texas bill becomes law. The bill would allow legally blind hunters to use a laser sight, or lighted pointing instrument, which is forbidden for sighted hunters, according to State Rep. Edmund Kuempel, who introduced it. "This opens up the fun of hunting to additional people, and I think that's great," Kuempel said."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.