1. R.I.P. David Foster Wallace: GreenCine collates the tributes. Among the Wallace pieces linked: "David Lynch Keeps His Head" (a personal favorite) and "Host" (a profile of radio host John Ziegler).
[""We're not perfect, we suck a lot of the time, but we are better as a people, as a culture, and as a society than they are, and we need to recognize that, so that we can possibly even begin to deal with the evil that we are facing." When Mr. Z.'s impassioned, his voice rises and his arms wave around (which obviously only those in the Airmix room can see). He also fidgets, bobs slightly up and down in his executive desk chair, and weaves. Although he must stay seated and can't pace around the room, the host does not have to keep his mouth any set distance from the microphone, since the board op, 'Mondo Hernandez, can adjust his levels on the mixing board's channel 7 so that Mr. Z.'s volume always stays in range and never peaks or fades. 'Mondo, whose price for letting outside parties hang around Airmix is one large bag of cool-ranch Doritos per evening, is an immense twenty-one-year-old man with a ponytail, stony Mesoamerican features, and the placid, grandmotherly eyes common to giant mammals everywhere."]
2. The voluminous Toronto International Film Festival coverage of my friend and colleague Daniel Kasman (starts at the bottom of the page).
["One of the pleasures of those lucky enough to attend the film festivals of Berlin and Cannes is that by the time one gets to Toronto, much of the higher profile films have been seen. This can allow one the leeway to catch some smaller discoveries, as well as hope that the more anticipated Venice selections gone un-selected by the New York Film Festival will live up to expectations. Chief among those is yet another meta-Takeshi Kitano movie (Achilles and the Tortoise), this one finally hopefully seen by me (unlike his undistributed last two), Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums, which for those who appreciate one of the greatest working filmmakers could not be anticipated higher, Mamoru Oshii’s return to “traditional” animation in a fighter pilot film (Sky Crawlers), and hopefully something lovely from Agnès Varda (Plages d’Agnès). There are a number of returning filmmakers whose previous works point to something exciting in their new films, like Jia Zhangke’s cinematographer Yu Lik-wai finally following up his underrated All Tomorrow’s Parties with Plastic City, and Christian Petzold, who made a splash, as they say, with Yella, is showing his Venice-debuted Jerichow. As for the discoveries? We’ll just have to wait and see; stay tuned over the next week."]
3. "Burton’s First Encounter with Taylor": From Cinebeats.
["I recently stumbled across this fascinating description of Richard Burton’s first meeting with Elizabeth Taylor written by Burton himself and borrowed from his book Meeting Mrs. Jenkins (1966). I enjoyed reading it so much that I just had to share it. Not only is it an amazing read but it’s also a great showcase for Burton’s wicked sense of humor and his wonderful way with words. Besides acting, directing and producing, Richard Burton was also an avid writer and he kept journals for most of his adult life."]
4. Nick Davis revisits The Third Man.
["Blending wry British wit with sleek, high-contrast menace, fusing the visual tropes of '40s film noir with neorealist attentions to the blights and hallmarks of rubbled European cities, The Third Man comes spectacularly close to being all things for all people. "I only do comedies, I don't play tragedy," sighs Alida Valli's knowing and morose actress Anna Schmidt, and it's a tribute to Graham Greene's spry and surprising script and even more to Carol Reed's stylish and crystalline direction that we can't tell if the movie holds Anna to her word or not. No one, not Reed, not Greene, not star Joseph Cotten, certainly not composer Anton Karas, overlooks the comic absurdity of protagonist Holly Martins's arrival in postwar Vienna to meet a rascally old friend named Harry Lime, only to find that Harry's coffin, with Harry in it, was trundled out of his opulent apartment only ten minutes before Holly shows up."]
5. Ed Howard on Burn After Reading.
["Burn After Reading is a kind of silly, twisted follow-up to the Coen brothers' last film, the relentlessly grim Western fable No Country For Old Men. Despite the tonal differences, both films place ordinary (if somewhat dim-witted) folks into a position where they are suddenly poised to have a lot of money, a situation that brings considerable violence into their previously routine lives. But the relationship between the two films is more than just a simplistic dichotomy between light and dark, comedy and tragedy, silly and serious; in their own ways, both films are tragedies, although tragedies of very different types. In No Country, violence enters the lives of the characters through a force of evil, the remorseless assassin Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a truly terrifying individual whose murderous rampage nevertheless adheres to his own warped moral code. There are no such evil characters in Burn After Reading, in which the violence arises neither from evil men nor moral failures, but from a combination of profound stupidity, rampant paranoia, and institutional cluelessness and indifference to consequences."]
Quote of the Day: Jean Paul Richter
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): From Dave Coverly's Speed Bump, hattip to reader S. Porath.
Clip of the Day: Cat vs. Printer. FIGHT!
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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. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Links for the Day (September 15th, 2008)
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2 comments:
DFW was such a talented writer and a good human being... these, his two well known traits, so often seemed to be at odds whenever he spoke on a subject, especially his own work.
His essay "E Unibus Pluram," might still be the best contextual examination of TV as it relates to literature that I've ever (or ever will) read.
Wallace's writing was significant and helpful to me at a critical time in my own career; I discovered him in the mid-90s, the fiction and the nonfiction, and like Norman Mailer (who was, of course, totally different from Wallace in temperament) he demonstrated that the supposed firewall between the two was actually quite porous, and that a writer did not have to tamp down his personality when writing nonfiction as opposed to fiction.
In fact, I treasure Wallace's nonfiction more than his fiction (which was mostly terrific) because it was so ambitious yet unpretentious; his observations were consistently sharp and funny, proof that great journalism is all about clearing one's head and absorbing one's surroundings without losing one's sense of self. Yet he was never content to just make lists of interesting stuff and arrange them in amusing patterns. He saw the big picture, connecting whatever specific subject he happened to be writing about to 20th century life, American life, his own life. His writing was one of the best living definitions of the word "humanism" that I can think of. He didn't cut the human race any breaks but he was endlessly fascinated by individual people and captured their shining peculiarities in bold, often affectionate strokes.
His Premiere magazine feature on Lynch is the most insightful piece on Lynch that has yet been written -- simultaneously a smashing piece of film scholarship, a comedic deconstruction of the 'You are there' set-visit pieces that were movie magazines' stock-in-trade, a superb collection of character sketches revealing the individual people behind the titles you see in the final credits, and a consideration of the relationship between filmmaker, critic and ticket buyer.
One bit that should be revisited by anybody trying to hang interpretations or labels on the director:
"David Lynch's movies are often described as occupying a kind of middle ground between art film and commercial film. But what they really occupy is a whole different kind of territory. Most of Lynch's best films don't really have much of a point, and in lots of ways they seem to resist the film-interpretive process by which movies' (certainly avant-garde movies') central points are understood. This is something the British critic Paul Taylor seems to get when he says that Lynch's movies are 'to be experienced rather than explained.'... You almost never in a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to 'entertain' you, and never that the point is to get you fork over money to see it. This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: you don't feel like you're entering into any of the standard unspoken/unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies. This is unsettling because in absence of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it. The absence of a point or recognizable agenda in Lynch's films, though, strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don't. This is why his best films' effects are often so emotional and nightmarish (we're defenseless in our dreams, too)."
That piece is in the nonfiction anthology A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which also contains the essential essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," which explores the aesthetic essence of commercial TV (and its forerunner, radio) -- particularly TVs coy tightrope-walk between obliviousness/naivete and self-reflexive cleverness -- i.e., between pretending not to know it's being watched and congratulating you for watching.
"Television regards irony sort of the way educated lonely people regard television. Television both fears irony's capacity to expose, and needs it. It needs irony because television was practically made for irony. For TV is a bisensuous medium. Its displacement of radio wasn't picture displacing sound; it was picture added. Since the tension between what's said and what's seen is irony's whole sales territory, classic televisual irony works via the conflicting juxtaposition of pictures and sounds. What's seen undercuts what's said. A scholarly article on network news describes a famous interview with a corporate guy from United Fruit on a CBS special about Guatemala: 'I sure don't know of anybody being so-called 'oppressed,' this guy, in a '70s leisure suit and bad comb-over, tells Ed Rabel. 'I think this is just something that some reporters have thought up.' The whole interview is intecut with commentless footage of big-bellied kids in Guatemalan slums and union organizers lying in the mud with cut throats."
R.I.P., DFW. You'll be missed.
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