The House Next Door

1. "big, bright, shining stars": By Jamais Vu at Thoughts of a Passionately Ambivalent Cinephile. (Hattip: Jason Sperb)

["The opening shot of PT Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love (2002) confronts us less with an auteurist perspective, and more with a star, the star laid bare. Stardom and authorship as modes of textual film analysis are both very popular among film scholars and critics, but they are also most often typically opposed. Analyses focused on stardom tend to privilege the cultural and historical contexts of the actor’s performances—seeing a star’s presence and popularity as symptomatic of larger social issues. Meanwhile, auteur theory, reflecting its literary origins, more often takes a formalist look at how a certain series of movies were similarly framed, paced and cut. While stars and auteurs have worked together since the golden days of Hollywood, critics and scholars usually privilege one over the other when offering a close examination, depending upon the particular text. There are exceptions, of course—some scholars with a wide enough canvas attempt to read both. More often, when scholars do talk of a star’s work with an auteur, two trends often emerge—the star’s persona is subsumed to the director’s hands, molded into a particularly striking vanishing point within the larger work of art."]

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2. "Content and Its Discontents": By Virginia Heffernan for The New York Times Magazine.

["Does anyone still believe that the forms of movies, television, magazines and newspapers might exist independently of their rapidly changing modes of distribution? The thought has become unsustainable. Take magazine writing. In school or on the job, magazine writers never learn anything so broad as to “tell great stories” or “make arresting images.” You don’t study the ancient art of storytelling. You learn to produce certain numbers and styles and forms of words and images. You learn to be succinct when a publication loses ad pages. You learn to dilate when an “article” is understood mostly as a delivery vehicle for pictures of a sexy celebrity. The words stack up under certain kinds of headlines that also adhere to strict conventions as to size and tone, and eventually they appear alongside certain kinds of photos and illustrations with certain kinds of captions on pages of certain dimensions that are often shared with advertisements. Just as shooting film for a Hollywood movie is never just filming and acting in a TV ad is never just acting, writing for a magazine is never just writing."]

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3. Two podcasts of note: Aaron Aradillas has cast and crew of Deadwood on Back By Midnight to reminisce (this is the first of two parts). And on Vinyl is Podcast, Ryland Walker Knight, Jennifer Stewart, and Mark Haslam do a body good.

["But today we saw Milk. We saw Milk at the Castro Theatre in the Castro at Castro and Market in San Francisco. All kinds of heightened levels of signification and significance and emotions. Also, it was overcast. It's finally getting cold around this town. And it feels great. Add to all that: it was a packed house and we sat in the third row. Now if only Milk were a little better. I really want to like this prim thing (and I do, for the most part) but it's kinda-sorta inconsistent—and, yes, it would be nothing if it weren't for Sean Penn's sure-to-win lead performance. Everybody's said it, as if it matters, so why not add to this choir of obvious hype: they should bow-tie the Oscar and engrave that shit yesterday. He's great—he really is!—and his joyful posture, even in a frown, is truly something to behold. I want people to see this movie, especially in our current season, precisely because it was designed for everyone. Gus Van Sant set out to make the movie that the most people would find purchase with—and he did just that—without a lot of his recent formal/aesthetic flourishes; although, to be fair, it's not like we're talking Ray or Walk The Line here. But I'm tired, and it's late, so I'm just going to direct you towards some of the sterling words that have already been written in favor of this film's simple virtues. As Steve Brule would say, "For your milk, dummy!""]

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4. "‘Farscape’ Creator Rockne O’Bannon Brings Series Back — As A Comic Book": Frell yeah! (Hattip: Ross Ruediger)

["For fans of the cult favorite sci-fi television show “Farscape,” which ended its four-year run on the Sci-Fi Channel in 2003, the adventure is about to begin again — or rather, pick up where it left off. Series creator Rockne O’Bannon has returned to world of “Farscape” to continue the story, not as a television series, but as a four-issue comic book miniseries due out December 24 from Boom Studios."]

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5. Click on this link to Ed Howard's site and consider yourself meme'd.

["There's a new meme going around, started by Nathan at Film Experience, to list twenty favorite actresses. No one, so far as I know, has actually tagged me, but what the hell, I'll do it anyway. Here are mine, with my favorite performances from each in parentheses."]

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Quote of the Day: Doctor Who

"There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Ben Stein's mind is fodder for a new comment record (I believe) at Roger Ebert's blog.



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Clip of the Day: The introductory video to the new website "Clerk Dogs." Take a gander.

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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.