The House Next Door

1. At What Is This Light, Martha Polk writes In Defense of Interrogation, focusing on last year's Blindness.

["The last three times I've mentioned that I have Blindness--Fernando Meirelles' 2008 adaption of the José Saramago novel--in my netflix queue, I've received variations of "didn't that go straight to video?" Well no, and in fact, I wish I'd seen it in the theater. There are a few disgusting choices in this movie as well as an intriguing expression of a familiar idea. There's something to be said about Blindness; we cannot stop at the surface, the surface, the surface. Its plot charges through what happens when All Of A Sudden (!) everybody starts to go blind, epidemic-style. Of course "The Government" has to quarantine folks and of course that means things quickly shape up to Lord Of the Flies dimensions and of course our protagonists (Julianne Moor's cheekbones be poppin' and Mark Ruffulo oddly still pulls off Cute) navigate toward a new freedom. I'll account for the above sass by spelling it out: Yes, yes indeed well-read critics, here the movie sits contentedly with the trite. Blindness' plot serves up the apocalypse and when we feel the film using well-worn tactics, it might be frustrating, boring, or downright painful. But here's something, I didn't want to watch just another bad movie about the fragility of humanity, so I didn't."]

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2. Andy Rector shares an oldie, goodie: Hawks at Work: The Making of LAND OF THE PHARAOHS -------- by Bill Krohn, Orignally published in the now defunct Los Angeles 'newspaper on film' Modern Times (Issue no. 4; April, 1990). More recently published in French as 'Hawks à l'ouvrage: La genèse de LAND OF THE PHARAOHS" in TRAFIC No. 63, Automne 2007.

["Land of the Pharaohs, Howard Hawks’ only attempt at an epic of ancient civilizations, figures in its author’s filmography as a film maudit. Defended at the time of its release by Cahiers du cinema (Rivette, Chabrol), it continues to intrigue Hawks’ admirers, who have always suspected that this bizarre deviation from our hero’s habitual concerns (a story extending over thirty years, instead of the usual fastidious "unities"; focus on a single powerful figure at the expense of the professional group, even more than in the anomalous Red River; flatly colloquial dialogue free of the pomposities of Hollywood epic speech-making, but also of any trace of humor; a tragic ending) must paradoxically contain the key to the art of this mysterious filmmaker. (Cf. Jean-Claude Biette in his eulogy for Hawks: "The greatness he achieved in filming the Relative kept him from occassionally running the risk of confronting the absolute. Nevertheless, he ran that risk once, in Land of the Pharaohs, an extraordinary film where the Relative admits its limits: the work leads, this time, to a gigantic apparatus of tombs." - reprinted in Poetique des auteurs). Or what amounts to the same thing, to his unconscious mind (Cf. Serge Daney’s psychoanalytic overview of the oeuvre, "Viellesse du meme" ["The One Grows Old", CdC 230, reprinted in La rampe], where pharaonic imagery abounds. So the existence of a book on the making of Land of the Pharaohs by Hawks’ second-unit director (Hollywood-sur-Nil, Publisher Ramsay Poche) raises hopes too high not to be dashed on a breathless first reading."]

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3. Robert Koehler is in Guadalajara. He's got missives from Day One and Day Two over at filmjourney. Our selection below is his final note. Day Three to come...

["If you think the recent musical chairs at festivals—Geoff Gilmore out of Sundance and in at Tribeca with John (Cooper) Cooper replacing him in Park City, Peter Scarlet out at Tribeca, Kent Jones out of Film Society at Lincoln Center, Rebecca Yeldham in as director of LAFF—is strictly an American phenomenon, think again. Fernando Pena, once artistic head of BAFICI after the Quintin era, has left the Mar del Plata festival after one year. Though it was set as a temporary gig, Pena was open to the idea that it might go on a bit longer. But now, he has what sounds like his dream job: Hosting a Monday-Friday program (airing, in pure Argentine fashion, at midnight) featuring works of classic cinema. Pena, a major archivist and private collector, and the man who discovered the complete version of Lang’s Metropolis in Buenos Aires, is now in his element, albeit not in a cinema. I didn’t get the channel, but I will once I get to BsAs, and pass it along. It all recalls KCET’s great cinema series, Film Odyssey, which aired in the early to mid-‘70s and was one of my earliest cinema schools. Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin hosted the weekly show, which generously dipped into the Janus Films catalogue, long before it became the Criterion Collection. Speaking of which, it’s time to pull Film Odyssey out of the video vaults—if the videotapes still exist."]

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4. Ray Pride digs Hunger. Four stars, in fact.

["Movies got confused in their first century. They forgot what they were (or are). Cinema started as an extension of photography, a curiosity of curiosities, of observation and witness in apparent real time. Think of the Lumière brothers' short pieces like Train Entering a Station. (L'Arrivée d'un train en Gare de la Ciotat, 1895). In reflected light, we see what we've seen as seen by someone else but seen as if in a dream. Movies with a thirst for light and enlightenment and in recent decades have largely become something else, tethered to scripts and money that must be made back and plotlines with only the slimmest of variations between them. Hunger has the scent of that nearly lost curiosity, a thirst for time's passage, for the stink of life, the punishing truth of duration. McQueen's earlier video installations and other non-narrative forms were tender and tactile. His work functions as bodily exploration, as forensic as it is dramatic, as bacterial as it is spiritual. Consider it corporeal punishment."]

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5. Apropos punishment, you can watch The Virgin Spring for free on The Auteurs right now. (Feel free to take my leading clause however you see fit.) Also hilarious? I saw this news via @theauteurs, because I joined, too, @ryknight, after much deliberation and (now hypocritical) mockery. Tweet away! And, you know, maybe watch that classic.

["The original 'Last House on the Left'"]

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Quote of the Day:

"Self-portraiture is something one should never get involved in, since it is wrong to lie even though one endeavours to tell the truth."
Ingmar Bergman

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Oh, just because.



*** One way to see Kill Bill on a limited budget, and time frame.
Clip of the Day:
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"Links for the Day": A selection of Links that will hopefully spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to ryknight at gmail dot com.