Links for the Day (October 22nd, 2007)

1. "Just a Tease": Fernando F. Croce reviews Lust, Caution; Michael Clayton; and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. (Lower photo from Daily Ha Ha.)

["Middlebrow artisan that he is, Ang Lee likes to work with absences. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a martial-arts bonanza without the thrills, The Hulk is a comic-book blockbuster without the wonder, and Brokeback Mountain is a queer romance without the passion. Now here's Lust, Caution, a spy yarn with sex scenes that, though stamped NC-17, have all the physical-emotional explosiveness of a freight train slogging by an intersection. Whoever claimed there's no such thing as bad sex should see the way Lee's cold eye oh so tastefully drains all heat and insight from the Tony Leung-Tang Wei fuckathons, efficiently turning the Kama Sutra into a garden tool catalog. If the sex is arid, the foreplay is worse: The narrative is Black Book minus Verhoeven's bracing luridness, with Eileen Chang's short story laid on the rack and stretched to 157 minutes."]

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2. "Thompson, Giuliani spar over conservative records": The mockery continues. From the L.A. Times.

["Eight presidential hopefuls clashed sharply over conservative purity Sunday night in the most contentious Republican debate of the 2008 race for the White House."]

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3. "Just a Moment: Was that really necessary?": Jonathan Lapper of Cinema Styles on a scene from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

["In Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer there is a scene of a home intrusion that is videotaped by the perpetrators. Because the scene is shown to us through the viewfinder of the video camera it takes on a verisimilitude that makes the action seem all too real for the viewer unlike the cinematically self-aware cleverness of Funny Games, which done eleven years later seems like a feature length accounting of this single scene. It should be noted however that nothing in the entire course of Funny Games even approaches the stomach-churning power of this one brief scene in Henry."]

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4. "Happy Trails": Michael Joshua Rowin reviews Jimmy Carter Man From Plains.

["Titled like an old-fashioned Western where a man in a white hat gallops in to save a town from ruthless villains, Jonathan Demme's "Jimmy Carter Man from Plains" portrays the 39th president as an intrepid political lone ranger, unafraid of provoking discussion on sensitive international matters at an age when most retired representatives ride inoffensively into the sunset."]

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5. "7,714 Movies, and Counting": Newsweek's David Ansen on a lifelong list. He's not alone in his habit. (Hattip: GreenCine Daily).

["On January 26, 1958 (the date is written in pencil), I began keeping a list of all the movies I'd seen, using lined notebook paper that I further divided in half so that I could get upwards of 50 movies per page. I was 12 years old. (Compulsive? I was too young to know the concept.) I would list the title on the left, then add the last names of the stars, and then give each movie a rating: Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good, Excellent, Superior. My scoring system was taken from a long-defunct magazine called The Motion Picture Herald."]

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Quote of the Day: George W. Ball

"Nostalgia is a seductive liar."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): From Munich (2005).



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Clip of the Day: Theme Song Sondheim returns, just in time for... HALLOWEEN!

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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.