Links for the Day (November 19th, 2008)

1. This Saturday sees The King of Comedy, Jerry Lewis, in conversation with Peter Bogdanovich at The Times Center in Manhattan. Information on the event can be found here. In conjunction, the Museum has commissioned an essay by Chris Fujiwara, now up at Moving Image Source.

["Lewis's films are adventures in multiplicity: things happen at the same time, and in the same space, that couldn't or shouldn't so happen (like the multiple Herberts rushing upstairs in panic in The Ladies Man). He loves to work with segmentation, to divide the frame into separate compartments (the line between stage and backstage in the prom scene of The Nutty Professor, the recording studio scene in The Patsy), to divide the narrative into blocks (the episodic structures of The Family Jewels and Hardly Working [1980]). Lewis's great originality as a filmmaker lies in his art of multiplying segmentation or segmenting multiplicity so as to produce a spiraling disorder that leads miraculously to a reassertion of order (as in the endings of The Family Jewels, Which Way to the Front?, and Cracking Up [1983]). His films take place in zones of indeterminacy and combinatorial freedom."]

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2. At Exiled Online, Eileen Jones rants on Quantum of Solace.

["Sadly, the liveliest movie currently in theaters doesn’t move well at all. There are lots and lots of action scenes cut together very badly. You never feel as if you’re getting the impact of the no-doubt exciting things that were staged in front of multiple cameras in locations all over the world. You have to take it on faith that the chase scenes grinding out onscreen involved amazing speed and danger and stunt-work, because it isn’t coming across. In a just world we’d be getting very close to saying R.I.P. Hollywood when directors of top action films can’t direct action. But this isn’t a just world, so we’ll drag on like this indefinitely, watching dull crap and saying, well, it could be worse, at least it’s not High School Musical 3."]

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3. Two featuring House man Ryland Walker Knight: the latest episode of Vinyl is Podcast and "An Amber Kaleidoscope," Ry's piece for The Auteur's Notebook on Lola Montes.

["More a gem than a crystal, Lola Montes begins looking up at twin chandeliers so baroque that their descending shudder makes one think the little globs of glass dangling will break free and fall to the floor at any second. Indeed: at one point our heroine walks a tightrope between literal, if equally metonymic, stages of her life. Martine Carol stars as Lola in Max Ophüls’ final film, acting as buxom locus for this spectacle of refraction, giving us plenty to savor as much as revile as much as pity while the director plays ringmaster (or Ringmaster plays Director) orchestrating her life’s story in swirls and tilts and all forms of excess. It’s a big movie. And, lucky for us, Rialto Pictures has imported a “definitive” 35mm restoration from the Cinémathèque Française to tour America, just like Ophuls’ salacious star subject."]

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4. "Why you probably don't want to get those politics in your sitcom": House man Todd VanDerWerff is back from his Obama campaign sojourn, which means a whole lot more South Dakota Dark. Check his most recent article above, and the site daily for fresh content.

["One of the things you'll occasionally hear TV comedy creators bemoan is the fact that they can't do politically-oriented sitcoms anymore. Some of the best sitcoms of the '70s (often considered to be the golden age of the form) were heavily centered on political issues, particularly Norman Lear's All in the Family, which often seemed to tackle a hot-button issue in every single episode. You'll also occasionally hear this from TV viewers or from their increasingly ineffectual proxies, the critics. "Why can't sitcoms tackle more serious issues?" they ask. "Whatever happened to THAT?" And, indeed, the success of the BLATANTLY political Daily Show and Colbert Report in the comedy field would seem to prove their point -- politics can make for good comedy, and, indeed, SHOULD make for good comedy. But, let's face it, that's not really the way it turns out most of the time. (If I were at all a good blogger, I would link to a few examples of this, but I'm lazy, and you should be glad to have me back, so you're not getting anything except my own personal recollection that American Dad was launched as something Seth MacFarlane insisted would be less like Family Guy and more like, you guessed it, All in the Family. While the show maintains a BIT of political edge, it does so only in the sense where it will make an occasional Family Guy-style cutaway political gag -- and this is coming from someone whose feelings have warmed considerably towards the show and is inclined to be generous.)"]

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5. Some coverage of David Lynch: The Lime Green Set: Dennis Lim in The L.A. Times and Billy Gil interviews the mysterious Mr. Lynch for Home Media Magazine.

["Lynch: I think there are chapter stops, I’m not positive. You know, I was against them because I wanted the film to be seen in purity. And then I changed because I think most people see it in its purity. But even in the theater, if in the middle of a film, you have to take a leak, during the time you’re leaking, you’re missing that part of the film. Correct? So this is even more assurance that you’re gonna see the whole thing and get back to the point you left. I think it’s not so bad."]

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Quote of the Day: Harlan Ellison

"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): God that's just wrong. With musical accompaniment.



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Clip of the Day: A belated (by one day) Happy 80th to Mortimer J. Mouse. Below clip, of Kenneth Anger's "Mouse Heaven," via Nathan Lee at WNYC.

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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.