Links for the Day (October 10th, 2008)

1. As companion to yesterday's lead link, Sean Axmaker has just completed a labor-of-love project at Parallax View, reprinting several essays/interviews related to Welles' Touch of Evil, and debuting a new piece on the tangled history of the film. In order: "Touch of Evil: Crossing the Line" (an appreciation by Robert C. Cumbow); "Actors loved him" (an interview with actor Charlton Heston); "A rough, jagged, jarring, shaking-you-up kind of movie" (an interview with actress Janet Leigh); "A once in a lifetime project" (an interview with film preservationist Bob O'Neill); "Let’s give them something to really work with" (an interview with Rick Schmidlin, who proposed the restoration); "A tremendous piece of filmmaking" (an interview with restoration editor Walter Murch); and "The Making, Unmaking and Reclamation of Touch of Evil" (Axmaker's new essay on the film's history).

["“There’s clearly no cut and dried answer here, in the absence of any documentary evidence, but my eye tells me that [the highly controversial 1.85 aspect ratio] is too tight,” writes Dave Kehr. I respect Kehr’s eye as I do his insight, but watching the revised cut in 1.85 for the first time was a revelation to me. Compositions became more dramatic, framed more tightly around Welles’ groupings. The long-takes in Sanchez’s apartment feel more claustrophobic, without so much of the expanse of the blank ceiling open above their heads. The characters dominate the mise-en-scene with more presence. Welles traditionally shot in 1.33, but watching the framing of the 1998 revision tells me that Welles took to the wider framing with a gusto. But that’s just my opinion, based on my feeling of the visual experience. Is it that Kehr is so used to the old compositions that the new framing feels wrong? Is it that I am so dazzled by the visual clarity and more modern compositions of the 1998 revision that I’m ascribing authorial intention where it doesn’t exist?"]

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2. At indieWIRE, Peter Knegt reports on the Apple Store Soho interview with Wong Kar Wai and Christopher Doyle, moderated by Armond White. Armond's review of Ashes of Time Redux, opening today in New York and Los Angeles, is here.

[""As I watch your films, I feel the way the characters are feeling," New York Press film critic Armond White told director Wong-Kar Wai as he introduced a discussion at the Apple Store Soho last weekend. "It comes across in the way the movie looks and it comes across especially through how you use music to underscore the images." The talk, presented by indieWIRE, featured "Ashes of Time Redux" director Wong-Kar Wai and longtime cinematographer Chris Doyle discussing the way they utilize music, not just in "Ashes" (which was given new music in its "Redux"), but in their many collaborations over the years."]

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3. "A free peek at George Bush's home away from home": Via Moving Picture Blog, a Hulu-housed documentary on Crawford, Texas. Also embedded above.

["Can't wait for Oliver Stone's W.? Then click on Crawford, David Modigliani's surprisingly even-handed and occasionally poignant account of the impact on the citizenry in the small Texas town chosen by George W. Bush to be the site of his co-called “Western White House.” (Yeah, that's right: The place Harold and Kumar dropped into in their last movie.) Filmed over several years, the documentary plays like a rise-and-fall drama populated with colorful, contrasting characters who have profoundly mixed feelings about being used essentially as props in Bush’s political stagecraft."]

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4. "This Way, Myth": Jonathan Rosenbaum on Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles.

["Me and Orson Welles (film and novel) is intermittently attentive to the latter but completely oblivious to the former, offering a Welles who insists on being called a genius and refuses any form of self-criticism. It also depicts him as a man who could nurse serious grudges over minor challenges to his authority—something my own research has failed to turn up. But insofar as Welles continues to be a shining beacon for the self-regard of others, the portrait hits a mythological bull’s-eye."]

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5. "Scientists confirm shark's ‘virgin birth’": Jaws is the messiah!

["Scientists have confirmed the second case of a "virgin birth" in a shark. In a study reported Friday in the Journal of Fish Biology, scientists said DNA testing proved that a pup carried by a female Atlantic blacktip shark in the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center contained no genetic material from a male. The first documented case of asexual reproduction, or parthenogenesis, among sharks involved a pup born to a hammerhead at an Omaha, Neb., zoo."]

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Quote of the Day: Henri-Frédéric Amiel

"Charm is the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves. "

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Image(s) of the Day (click to enlarge): Can't cry bullshit on this one...







Well... maybe you can.

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Clip of the Day: I guess they did rape our childhood...

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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.