1. "Angela Bassett honored with Walk of Fame star": You go, girl! Related: Bassett on working with Tyler Perry.
["Angela Bassett has had good days — becoming a mother to twins, winning a Golden Globe, being nominated for an Academy Award. Then there was Thursday. “Do you ever have one of those days? I woke up and the sun wasn’t really shining but then it burst through the clouds and it was glorious. Hallelujah!” Bassett exclaimed to the crowd at the ceremony for the 2,358th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Bassett, 49, was joined by husband Courtney B. Vance, their children and guests Forest Whitaker, Laurence Fishburne and Rick Fox, her co-star in the new film “Meet the Browns,” out Friday."]
2. House contributor Kevin B. Lee live-blogged the recent NYU Film Criticism Workshop, featuring Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin, in five parts: One, Two, Three, Four, and Five. Girish Shambu was there as well.
["Quoting Daney: “I want to militate cinema for cinema.” - cinema activism on behalf of cinema itself as a political or social movement, as opposed to being a function of political or social purposes."]
3. "There Will Be Vader": Deserves a link all its own, this one. (Hattip: Kevin Seaman)
4. "Gate Way: An(other) Interview with Olivier Assayas": Nick Pinkerton sits down with the Boarding Gate director for a chat.
["Assayas: "I don’t know if it makes sense, but I was struck by a friend of mine, Nicolas Saada, who used to be a writer for Cahiers and now is a filmmaker, and when he saw the film, his reaction was: “You have made a movie about addiction, which is demonlover, then you made a movie, Clean, which is about going clean, and now you’ve made a movie that’s about both things at the same time.” Which was, you know, told as a joke, but somehow it kind of stuck with me, and I thought it was not a bad way of looking at it.""]
5. "Jumping eagle ray kills boater off Florida Keys": From The National Post.
["An eagle ray leaped onto a boat off the Florida Keys Thursday and stabbed a woman with its barb, knocking her to the deck and killing her, a Florida wildlife investigator said. "It's a bizarre accident," said Jorge Pino, an agent with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission."]
Quote of the Day: John Waters
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Time for another Reverse Blog "Poster of the Week"!
Clip(s) of the Day: The Fatal Farm Alternate TV openings tend towards the hilariously disturbing. Here are my faves:
The (Pun Heavy) Facts of Life
The (Totally Baked) Golden Girls
Cheers (Jihad edition)
Knight Rider (WTF?!!)
Designing Women (Eye Roll Edition)
DuckTales (To Catch a Predator Edition)
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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.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Links for the Day (March 21st, 2008)
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10 comments:
The Knight Rider one remains my favorite, whereas the Ducktales clip makes me feel bad for laughing.
Re: 4
"It's a bizarre accident"
Meet Captain Understatement.
Re: #1: It's about time. And I'm glad Bassett is being less "selective" (or picky) about the roles she chooses. Yeah, I'd love it if she only appeared in great parts. But she hasn't been as ubiquitous recently as she was in the mid-'90s, and I miss her.
Re: #3. Totally fucked up. And great.
Re: #4. Stories of humans dying freakish deaths at the hands of wild animals always become huge news, probably because they're so rare. It's almost as if it's humanity's way of reassuring itself that it hasn't completely shattered and subjugated the natural world.
Speaking of freakish: this.
My goodness, There WIll Be Vader? That mightily disturbing DuckTales clip? Who ARE these people?
I want to thank them.
I realized how much I missed Bassett when she showed up in "Akeelah and the Bee," a movie I liked quite a bit, but which really took off every time she was on screen. That said, I have to see "Meet the Browns" tonight and, as a virgin when it comes to Tyler Perry movies -- never seen one -- have no idea what to expect. Broad comedy? I hope not. Bassett is good at many things, but I'm having a hard time thinking of her playing alongside Madea, or whatever that character's name is.
Re There Will Be Vader: Was the Howard Dean during Luke's rampage at the end of Jedi really necessary? Maybe they could have taken some of Eli Sunday's shouting instead. It seems so out of place in something so otherwise perfect.
#3: Wow. Creepy good.
I'm still freaked out by the Brahms(?)at the end. Well, not freaked out -- rattled and disappointed. Don't really understand why Anderson went that way, the music just being the hit-you-over-the-head coda to what felt like a final scene from a very different movie. I know -- I'm months late on this . . .
Nomi:
Well, he does use the Brahms earlier in the film, as I recall, when the Little Boston pump is first turned on (I think, but I might be hazy on this). Anyway, the think the whole last scene is comically tragic (a contradiction in terms, but I think apt) and that the Brahms helps to underscore the "ha" moment of "I'm finished" (a more cerebral "ha" than some people may have taken it to be, but it is a moment of humor nonetheless). Anyway, that's a long way of saying I felt the Brahms was effective.
And at any rate, that Vader mash-up is pretty damn funny.
Tom: Yes, it's definitely something to argue, that the music underscores that tragicomic tone, as opposed to pushing it over into a kind of farce.
But I guess the whole shift in tone at the end came off as cheap to me. But I'm somewhat of two minds about it; it was a risk, an exciting risk. I admire the attempt. And it's not that I wanted to see him predictably floating off to some draconian institution. This just felt slightly exploitive in a movie that otherwise did not.
Anderson has a great ear for music. The tune he uses in There Will Be Blood reminds me of Kubrick's use of the repetitive piano chord in Eyes Wide Shut - I think it's Ligeti? - just to keep us a little on edge.
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