1. "Mockingbird Director Robert Mulligan Dies at 83": Richard Corliss eulogizes in TIME. Dave Kehr has an open comments thread here (lead image taken from there). GreenCine entry here. More from Glenn Kenny here. Please share your thoughts and remembrances below.
["Mulligan, who died Saturday at 83 of heart disease, had been Finch's gentle shepherd, and deserved at least a share of Peck's Oscar both for casting him and for eliciting the actor's best work. But the director's heart, here as in so many of his films, was with the Finch children. If Mulligan had an abiding interest, it was troubled youngsters on the cusp of discovering themselves by confronting the world around them. This theme occupied him from his first feature film to his last. The 1957 Fear Strikes Out gave Anthony Perkins his first lead role as Boston Red Sox star Jim Piersall, reduced to bipolar rage by a domineering parent (sort of a Psycho in Center Field). In The Man in the Moon, Mulligan's swan song in 1991, Reese Witherspoon made her film debut as a 14-year-old wracked with first love for a 17-year-old boy who covets her older sister."]
2. "Poet Chosen for Inauguration Is Aiming for a Work That Transcends the Moment": From The New York Times. (Hattip: Eugene Hernandez.) Click here to go Ms. Alexander's official website.
["Elizabeth Alexander, who teaches at Yale, was plucked last week from the relatively obscure recesses of contemporary poetry for a moment on the world stage. President-elect Barack Obama has commissioned her to compose and read a poem for his inauguration, making her only the fourth poet in American history to read at one and elevating the art to unaccustomed prominence in the national psyche, at least for a day."]
3. The eighth and ninth episodes of Vinyl is Podcast. House contributor Ryland Walker Knight on both; guest star on 8 is Daniel Coffeen, on 9 Brian Darr.
["9th Episode Intro: RWK here tryna glut our hello lil kitty (kiddy?) corner of the internet with two podcasts in two days. This late afternoon Brian Darr and I took in some dreamlands of the night at the PFA Library here in Berkeley. (You can browse their Film Collection online.) As I say in the podcast, I'm not particularly well versed in the avant-garde. Before today I had only seen stills from and read essays about and seen the littlest of little clips of Brakhage's bigger than big films. Before today I had seen zero films by Bruce Conner, much less read anything by him. And before, inside today, I was seriously down in the dumps of confusion after reading Sheila O'Malley's rather beautiful pean to Mickey Rourke and all his hurt. So these films this afternoon sure did lift. They did some real lifting. I think this comes through in our talk, too. It started with a Kenneth Anger film, called Eaux d'Artifice, which, surprisingly, you can watch by clicking right here if you want to watch it all monochrome blues, without the occasional pink highlight. Then we moved into Anticipation of the Night by Brakhage (the pix above are stolen from Fred Camper and repurposed/reordered and cropped/edited by me). Then, after Mothlight (yes!), we watched Bruce Baillie's All My Life, which you can watch by clicking right here, if you want to watch it on youtube, which seems like sacrilege after seeing it on what has to be one of the most beautiful 16mm prints around in this cinephile-world. Then my fatigue got the better of me and I missed out on some James Benning and Bette Gordon before we switched to DVD to watch two Conner shorts, which knocked my socks off my feet and (kind of) into my mouth. It was a hell of an inauguration. And now, here it comes, the compulsion to see more. Of course, given my love of words, there's a compulsion to read more, in turn, and I think a great first place to start has to be the Avant-Garde Blog-A-Thon that Girish started/hosted with this post. There's plenty there to keep a curious reader/seer busy for years to come. Guess that's my plan!"]
4. "The Way We Weren't: Art Under Bush": By regular House commenter Movieman0283.
["To put it as succinctly as I can, the Bush era was defined not only by its crises, but by the way it ignored these crises' implications, the way it papered over a damaged psyche with materialistic triviality and an inability to engage with the world in a serious fashion. To say the cultural establishment was complicit in this shallow cover-up is an understatement: it was the cover-up. It continued to perpetuate and facilitate an ironic, arch tone, a glib obsession with triviality and trash, and an aesthetic elegance which achieved the weird paradox of tasteful decadence. Why was this exactly? Institutions in denial about their own impotence and humanity? The disastrous fruits of postmodern surrender? Obsession with profits and success and trendspotting? The result of a corrosion of older (perhaps outdated) values, without new ones to replace them? I'm not sure. Perhaps all of these factors combined to create a cultural establishment which resembled an ostrich whose head was buried deep in the post-9/11 ash."]
5. Peter Suderman and Michael Tully take a few year-enders down a peg: Suderman on Slumdog Millionaire; Tully on Revolutionary Road.
["There are times when it's embarrassing to be a movie critic. Critics are an unusual bunch, a cantankerous breed for whom the dictum "if you can't say something nice, then don't say nuthin' at all" never stuck, and who tend to cultivate attitudes of skepticism and chilly distance. Understandably, they are often cast as fun-o-phobic curmudgeons whose only delight is in slagging the simple, popular pleasures that roll off Hollywood assembly lines each year. Nonetheless, there rare moments in which the nation's cranky cinephile legions find their steely exteriors mysteriously penetrated, and join together to praise some lucky motion picture for its verve, its energy, and maybe even its heart. The result is a slobbering critical one-upmanship, in which writers compete to offer the most obsequious, over-the-top praise. "Rapturous." "A celebration of perseverance and moral triumph." A "one-in-a-million paradox" with "sweeping impact." Listen to them sing! This happens only once every few years, and it is a sight to see. This year, the caustic hordes have coalesced around Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire. Shot in Mumbai on a smallish budget with a cast of unknowns, Danny Boyle's frenetically stylish story of a boy who wins millions on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire while pursuing his one, true love has earned a slew of unadulterated — and undeserved — raves."]
Quote of the Day: Alfred Korzybski
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): The Martin McDonagh play, now playing at Manhattan's Linda Gross Theater, reviewed here by House contributor Lauren Wissot.
Clip of the Day: An announcement from YouTube re-enactor Brandon Hardesty. Click here to go to the YouTube movie channel.
"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, December 22, 2008
Links for the Day (December 22nd, 2008)
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4 comments:
THANKS, Keith, for the shouts. And thanks, yes, to anybody willing to listen to us gab. We really love you. Also, we love Nina Simone. Especially when she sings a George Hairyson song.
Thanks for the link-up. Interestingly juxtaposed with Obama's selection of a poet to read at the inauguration...perhaps there's new, more fruitful age in store for the arts under Obama...
And thanks for the Robert Mulligan links. I hadn't realized he had passed away, but I've always thought To Kill a Mockingbird an excellent film, rare in that it's a "message" movie, rare in that it's based on a beloved book which it actually lives up to. RIP.
Re: #4
Perhaps I'm oversimplifying the matter, but I no longer have any use for film write-ups that revolve around the popular critical reaction of any given film.
More and more I'm seeing film reviews that amount to a whiny "Why do people like films I don't like?" or "Why don't they like what I like?" Convince me with a well-written analysis of the film in question, not a list of reasons why you 'get it' and everyone else doesn't.
For the record, this isn't me coming to the defense of "Slumdog Millionaire", which I liked but didn't love. I've been seeing this type of thing in the blogosphere for a while now, from writers I otherwise admire.
Mike Doc, you're not alone. I feel your pain.
Go to the Links for the Day on December 5th where this topic was brought up.
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