Scarlett Cinema

David Lynch: He'll Steal Your Heart

2009-12-06T17:18:00.000-06:00

"TFBS"
Since things are slow around here, and since I've already showered you in director David Lynch's cleansing stream of clarity regarding movies on the iPhone, here's one more happy nugget from Davey. This time: On Product Placement

This could become a regular series.

Thanks to brickshot for the call out!

Coming back from the abyss to say...

2009-11-20T20:31:00.015-06:00

My hiatus from Scarlett has been embarrassingly, shockingly long. In fact, after a while, I felt almost afraid to venture back here for fear that, well, people might think I had no business returning. I've seen a plethora of films in the last six months that I have both loved and hated, about which I have had both opinions and thoughts. And while I have found it worthwhile to share those opinions and thoughts from time to time in the past, to be perfectly honest, my mind has been preoccupied with other endeavors related to film in more recent months.

So, it took a subject about which I am incredibly passionate to compel me to write this post tonight, which is Tribeca All Access ("TAA"), a tremendously successful advocacy and career development forum for both emerging and established directors and screenwriters who come from traditionally underrepresented communities within the film industry. Having worked with the program for the past five years, I can attest to the amazing results and singularly spectacular experiences that TAA has been able to afford its alumni. Past participants who were able to launch their projects in no small part because of TAA include: Tze Chun (Children of Invention), Paola Mendoza & Gloria LaMorte (Entre nos), and Cherien Dabis (Amreeka), all of whom have gone on to great acclaim on the film festival circuit and are now beginning to enjoy more attention from the mainstream.

During the Tribeca Film Festival, those filmmakers and screenwriters whose projects have been chosen to participate in TAA will be invited to participate in a series of workshops and panels, before pitching their narrative scripts or documentary works-in progress in a series of one-on-one business meetings with industry executives. After the festival, TAA continues to offer year-long support to its alumni as they endeavor to further their careers as well as realize their artistic goals. The early deadline for submissions this year has already passed (October 26), but the regular submission period will stay open through December 14. I cannot praise the program highly enough, as it remains one of the few forums in which mainstream Hollywood meets and actually seems to give a damn about new, exciting, and critically important voices that need to be heard within the dialog of American-produced cinema.

To find out more about this year's open submissions, click here. And if you do decide to submit, best of luck!

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: P

2009-11-16T07:10:00.000-06:00

I'm hard pressed to pick just one or two P words from Marlene's stunning chapter on the letter P. No mention of "pink," one of my personal favorite voiceless bilabial plosives, but she does offer sound advice on P words on sartorial choices, The City of Light, small home electronic devices, and certain desserts. For instance,

Pants
In Texas, when you want to say that a man is beautiful or handsome you simply say: "His pants fit him."

Across the country and across the pond from the Republic of Texas, though, I enjoy everything Marlene has to say about what is perhaps the greatest European city,

Paris
Home which keeps its promise.

Bonjour, merci, au revoir, la vin blanc!--they may be the only French words I know, but I like the sound of the next phrase that I can't quite translate. Something to do with "Say lovely things to me," or "Speak to me, my love." (French speakers, that's your cue to fill me in.)

Parlez-moi d'amour
Yes, please do. The loving heart is a bad mind reader.

Just today, in fact, I happened to note on a list of things I need, a...

Pencil Sharpener (Electric)
Anyone who doesn't have one misses a great delight.

Indeed, sharpening that column of wood and graphite to a fine point is gratifying. When you do it, you are prepared. You are ready to write. A good pencil is the perfect instrument to take your thoughts from your mind to your notebook fluidly. When the lead is the right grade, the pencil fresh, and at a good length resting in your hand, nothing feels more organic against the grain of the page. Long live the pencil (and the electric pencil sharpener)! After all that writing you've built up an appetite, in fact, you're famished. And if you've had a productive enough day, you don't just deserve a meal, you deserve a treat--you deserve a perfect slice of...

Pie
There is no better pie than lemon chiffon pie.

I'll take spiced plum with a butter crust, myself. But it's no use splitting hairs, pie is something we can all agree on. Simply, perfectly, pie!

Slipping Through Space

2009-11-09T22:35:00.000-06:00

Here I am!

Embrace the moment now while I am here, I have a feeling I may disappear again shortly. It goes like this: I moved, I lived out of a suitcase for two weeks, I relocated, then sat--where I still remain now--in a temporary apartment in beautiful Ft. Greene, Brooklyn with a new iMac that has outsmarted me in the password department. I'm locked out!

For the next few sentences or paragraphs I intend to ramble in a tone that is hopefully not too incoherent about the movies I've seen in the past month-and-a-half and the soul draining sadness I feel from the consistent lack of them in that time frame. I am at the point where I'm writing post-it notes to myself, "Watch a movie!" lest I forget. My eyes are lazy. They're atrophied. Do you know this feeling, when you're used to looking and watching, having that clanking bell of emotions reverberate inside yourself from seeing such things? It's some life-validating source of curiosity that is suddenly pulled away from you, leaving your eyes to rest lazily upon the landscape with no newness.

I haven't consistently seen in so long it is like a cataract dulling my line of sight. The eyes dull to cinema when you don't watch. You've got to keep up! It's like practicing a sport. If you live by consistency and dedication, your athletic prowess improves. And so it is with the movies: the more you watch the more you see.

Alas! I have been sleepwalking for weeks.

As my daily life begins to settle a few films have trickled in. For instance, Paranormal Activity at the Brooklyn Pavilion last night. I did a jig inside my head I was so giddy to be back at the theater, but then the movie started and I was unplugged from that amp. How long would this alternating structure of daytime-nighttime documentation continue? The sun rises and the feigned bickering of an impossibly wealthy 20-something couple fills the gritty video space with a weight as light as freshly sifted flour. The night sets in--usually around 3:15 a.m., to be exact--and the creep show starts. I'm a wimp who likes to be scared by spectacles like this, so my heart had a few starts (the footprints through the powder! the door slam!), but in all, what a snooze.

So, after my hiatus, I'll have to work my way up to better pictures.

Tonight I made it to the end of my old stand-by, My Man Godfrey (1936). I keep a handful of DVDs unpacked in a stack of urgent belonging that I need at my ready. There's my William Wordsworth anthology, the third edition of the American Heritage, a thesaurus, Marlene Dietrich's ABC, Singin' in the Rain, The Godfather, Clueless, and My Man. Also, notebooks and pens. In an apartment that's still decorated in brown corrugate, these are happy bits of equipage. I put on My Man every other night or so for 15 or 20 minutes while I sit upright in a blue ladder-back chair eating my dinner from a large serving plate (new dishes have not been purchased yet), so it takes a while to get through a full movie. Besides, I really only need a few minutes of comfortable distraction.

Tonight I finished it though, and decided again that Carole Lombard is my favorite actress of all-time, just behind Barbara Stanwyck. My Man Godfrey is a perfect Hollywood narrative. No surprises. You know where the story is headed. Carole Lombard plays an airhead we can love, and William Powell speaks with a cadence that makes you think the words are just dancing off his lips.

A day or two before I drove my moving van out of Chicago I caught Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are. While I don't think it's a great film, for its jarring tantrum scenes that usually feel unprovoked, its overwhelming melancholy struck a true chord in me. I haven't seen a children's movie that has ever been so eager to explore that emotion, unrelentingly. The critical consensus marks that as a detriment to it, but I remember feeling a melancholy strangely similar to this as a kid that I could never articulate. It was sweet.

Sweet dreams for tonight. I hope to see Good Hair tomorrow! Or maybe Capitalism: A Love Story. Or Antichrist. Or...

Lynch Socks it to the iPhone

2009-10-21T14:37:00.000-05:00

I'm willing to pay a good ticket price to hear David Lynch lecture on the vices of movie-watching on the iPhone. Until then...

...that about sums it up for me.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: Oh, O!

2009-10-07T19:41:00.003-05:00

O is a cute letter. A jubilant, silly one. Not silly in the sense that it connotes frivolity or ignorance; but silly in its infinite, tubby rotundness that when pronounced makes its speaker sound awfully harmless and light. I think if there is a letter that most describes my personality it would definitely be O, even if I prefer the letters P and K (in that order). So I've got allegiance to my initials, who doesn't?

Back to O. Maybe I like it so much because, as a vowel, it is so easily malleable to sound like any of its four other brethren vowels, like for example, the letter A in:

Oxygen (out of a tank)
Why wait till you are under a tent to breath it in?

But mostly, as described in previous notes on Ms. Dietrich's alphabet, O words sound outstandingly like themselves. Like the most important O word of all!

Optimism
Have it. There is always time to cry later.

Jennifer's Body (2009)

2009-10-04T22:50:00.004-05:00

Until I saw Jennifer's Body the only Megan Fox I knew was the scantily clad brunette who basked in the perfect bronze glow of Michael Bay's plasticky summer blockbusters, the Transformer series. To say she "basked" in his artificial light, though, is probably a misnomer; it's more apt to say she was simply on display, like a mannequin with changeable sexy facial expressions. Her character in Transformers is a cliche to say the least, a mass offense to feminism at worst. In either case, it's safe to say we did not get a fair opportunity to judge Ms. Fox as an actress so much as we did as a Forever 21 model.

When I heard of her role in the new teen horror movie, Jennifer's Body I figured this was redemption time. Poof, be gone, Mr. Bay! While she hit the big time in the director's toy robot movies that gave her wider visibility in a business that's dauntingly difficult to break into, it happened at the expense of becoming objectified as a "salty" piece of meat.

That is the screenwriter of Jennifer's Body, Diablo Cody's code for "hot." Fox sat quietly in her savory marinade but rose, ironically, as a hungry maneater. If there was ever a more clever and cunning response to the platitudes given her in Transformers, I can't fathom it: Jennifer (Megan Fox) tears boys limb from limb, savoring their flesh, ruthlessly. So much for that beauteous bronze glow, it's more like a first-degree sunburn now.

More than a response to the silly incoherence of the role Michael Bay provided for Fox, however, Jennifer's Body is foremost a teen picture--a woman's picture even, and of course, a horror. I like the sequence of those classifications, going from teen to woman to horror; swirl them all into one and you've got a dozen Lifetime movies--"We triumph because we're victims!"

But Jennifer is kind of a victim. She's got more than a fair share of daddy issues that leave her to the devices of a rather cruel gang of rockers from the city. Visiting her hometown of Devil's Kettle, Minnesota, the guys lure her effortlessly away from her dedicated best friend, Needy (Amanda Seyfried), in, of all things, a van. Not an up-to-date, modern mini-van; no, this is a full-on rapemobile, the kind from the kidnapping dramatizations in Unsolved Mysteries (coincidentally, that show ended its run with host Robert Stack in 2002 on the Lifetime network, go figure).

To parse through this line of thought though, as a teen film it works as a gory satire in its depiction of the impossible social pressures, emotional frailty, and physical uncertainty of being a teenager. "Hell is a teenaged girl," says Needy in the film's opening line. Jennifer's Body makes that a literal reality.

Directed by a woman (Karyn Katsuma) and written by a woman (Diablo Cody), this could also be classified as woman's picture. Two females lead the movie as both primary protagonist (Needy) and antagonist (Jennifer). The men are only minor characters, though ones that work as the only fuel for the girls' motivations. While Jennifer seeks revenge by gobbling up the guts of her dates like they were Thanksgiving turkeys, Needy has a more reasoned approach.

After a lifetime of neglect from her bestie Jennifer, Needy is at her pal's side devotedly, sympathizing with her plight of prettiness and cruelty because that's simply the state of the status quo. It's not until she comes to the mature realization that Jennifer keeps her around as a punching bag--she's the nerdy friend used and abused to build up her self-confidence--that their relationship dynamic takes a turn.

For those concerned with spoilers, stop here, but the fact that Needy pushes a stake through the heart of her vampire companion that brings us to the film's final bookend at her new residence at the psych ward, well, that too speaks to the tenuous nature of female friendships. More specificially though, what does it mean that Needy, a perfectly normal teenaged girl with a healthy love life and aptitude for scholastics ends her high school tour at a mental institution? That Jennifer, a pretty but utterly mean and insecure girl, is killed?

On the surface, there doesn't seem to be much hope anticipated or delineated in Jennifer's Body for young women. They can definitely speak up for themselves, but that isn't a much improved-upon statistic from another female director's films, Amy Heckerling's 15-year-old teen pic Clueless from 1995, for example.

Of course, looking at it as a horror solely, Jennifer's Body takes on a alternate meaning. Where young and adolescent women are dressed up in mini-skirts as meat for the killing in recent horrors (e.g. Saw), at least Jennifer's Body keeps the women at the helm, dressed for the most part, and packaged with a brain.

Still, Jennifer's defining characteristic, to me, comes back to its lead, Ms. Fox. She's the star. And she speaks. It may be in the tongue of Cody's clamoring colloquialisms ("Hey, Monistat." "What's up, Vagisil?"), but it's a big step away from Michael Bay's direction. That isn't a bad thing.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: N

2009-09-29T19:44:00.000-05:00

Oh, sleek and snappy dark nail polish that is so the in thing this season in fashion, I adore you. You make my punky fashion spirit socially acceptable at the office, even as you chip away to that gnawed dot of color in the middle of my nail weeks after a painting.

Unfortunately, Ms. Dietrich does not agree. Though, I choose to believe that were she alive today she'd be right on board with this progressive punk vibe. Alas...

Nail Polish
Dark nail polish is vulgar.

Win or Lose: A Summer Camp Story (2009)

2009-09-24T22:19:00.000-05:00

Have you ever heard of Camp Ojibwa? I had not until this summer, when I saw director Louis Lapat’s documentary Win or Lose: A Summer Camp Story (2009) that takes place at this oddly named summer camp for boys. Perusing Ojibwa's website I have learned that the camp has been around for decades, dating back to 1928 when its founding director set up shop in the North Woods of Wisconsin. I suspect it is quietly famous among the generations of boys who have attended its lakeshore locale, who Lapat says consists of mostly the affluent Jewish, a kind of Skull and Bones society for kids revved up for field hockey matches and mess hall banter rather in place of forged political ties and the carrying out of dirty tricks.

Boys ranging in age from seven to 16 leave their home cities for eight weeks to meet there, trading in their parents’ cul-de-sac playground for intense training and bonding sessions that culminate in the camp’s famous “Collegiate Week.” This is the final, defining event of the boys’ interim adventure that Lapat features in his film. The campers are divided into teams and assigned a coach who has named them after his favorite college team, hence “Collegiate Week.” All coaches are Ojibwa alums. When their team is down they specialize in shirtless rages of abdominal flexing, and yelling that sounds more like a baritone bark—that special kind of sports-related incoherence that 20-year-old guys are so good at inflecting. You may have just felt a testosterone rush.

Lapat tempers that testosterone buzz by inserting himself in the narrative—as an animated punk rocker in stick figure form—that lends a touch of sentimentality amidst the Collegiate Week’s fierce competitiveness. He was a four-time Ojibwa camper that shared a common lack of athletic ability with the greater majority of his campmates: Ojibwa is a place for the scrawnier boys at school to live out the athletic dreams that they can never reach in reality. Though, there are still a few fellas peppered into the mix with enough ambition and ability to make you squirm at the far end of the dodgeball court like a scared dog. One of those kids is 10-year-old Jeremy Nachbar who pep talks his teammates with fluent vigor, and if we can bump this kid’s verbal score on the SAT, he will already be ready for professional coaching. He only needs a little more diversity in his vocabulary.

Judging by Jeremy’s coach, Andrew Robinson, the famously competitive ladies’ man and party

animal, who answers to the macho diminutive name “Arob” (think how perfect this name sounds bellowed through the air of a college house party), you can see where Jeremy gets his inspiration. But then there is coach Adam Korn with a soft belly and a kinder heart. An Ojibwa alumni of a different sort, Adam was probably the kid who was picked last for the team and starved for peer approval during his formative years at camp, and if there is any criticism of this well put together first feature from Lapat, served in a neat 58 minutes, it would be the dimmer spotlight that is placed on him. While the film explores a number of different characters in its course, Arob emerges as the movie’s clear star.

So I asked myself as I watched Win or Lose, is the lean cut and fast-talking Arob really the guy I want to be rooting for? Is he my hero, or is it Adam, or even better, is it the disaffected and wonderfully sarcastic 13-year-old Joel Lapin who thinks Collegiate Week is a joke and would prefer to drop competition and watch daytime TV? I can’t help but sympathize with the nerdy and naturally witty; Joel stole my heart, and I suspect he stole Lapat’s too. It is he, after all, who plays himself in a retrospective of animated vignettes that illustrate his own awkward adolescence and gothic fashion sense, but never bitterly. Like him, I was content on the sidelines watching Joel and Jeremy, and Arob and Adam play, because abstractly, those portraits led inevitably to flashes of my own adolescent and young adult memories (all of the humiliations and exhilarations at once), and I felt at peace knowing they were behind me. Tomorrow morning I’ll face a corporate gunslinger shooting down my cubicle. Maybe then I’ll think of Ojibwa. For tomorrow’s distress will soon be a mere flicker in the memories of yore.

Director Louis Lapat’s Win or Lose: A Summer Camp Story has aired in the Midwest on PBS, and will continue to screen nationwide on PBS in the coming months. It has screened at the Wisconsin, Minneapolis, and Sausalito Film Festivals, and will play at the Denver International Film Festival this November. It is also the winner of the Student Academy Awards in New York. Contact your PBS station for airdates.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: M

2009-09-14T00:12:00.003-05:00

It's after midnight as I write this and the Monday morning workday is a scant few hours away. It's fitting, then, that Marlene tell us a little something about...

Melancholy
Having the blues, or Weltschmerz. Being in the depths of sadness is just as important an experience as being exuberantly happy.

That sentiment speaks to something else I miss on Sunday nights: Mad Men. Having finished the first season and jonesing now for the second, while I long for a cable subscription to watch the third, I thought of Draper and company as I read what Marlene had to say about the...

Martini
I am deeply suspicious of men who carry martinis to the lunch or dinner table.

Such savvy intuition!

Ponyo (2009)

2009-09-07T18:54:00.005-05:00

Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo was one of the two great movies I caught over the holiday weekend. The other is hardly as hug-able as Ponyo--Bobcat Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad, a miracle of politically incorrect humor (maybe more on it later)--but Ponyo could have kept me bubbling over happily on its own. A little goldfish longing to be a girl sneaks to the surface where her fateful friend Sosuke scoops her up in a pail. They're instant BFFs. And after licking a cut clean on Sosuke's finger, Ponyo the fish turns into the girl you see in the above still, running across waves of water to be with her friend. She's not just weightless on water, either; she's a total free spirit with almost no learned associations of daily human life: a towel, a bowl of soup, a lick of honey from a teaspoon is as wondrous to Ponyo as her skipping across waves is to us.

As usual, Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki's hand-drawn animation is stellar, lively, and a fine dedication to an art form that is now overshadowed by computer animation. Comparing the virtues of hand-drawn vs. computer animation is a little bit of apples and oranges, but there is something to be said for the signature oozy forms Miyazaki is so great at creating. Visually, his Howl's Moving Castle (2004) is one cloud form melting seamlessly into another, and when I think of his Spirited Away (2001), it's the animated goop that spreads like a molasses trail off spooky characters from the underworld that I see; it's a look I would not immediately associate with animation that's not CGI. After all, with the advent of computer animation cartoons became increasingly aerodynamic. He-Man looks like he was modeled after Zac Efron more than he was a boxy pro wrestler, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have definitely had some work done. Add the bulbous Pixar figures to the mix and cartoons of late look downright bubbly. That's altogether fine by me, but it's not an aesthetic I'd assign to the rawness that hand-drawn images inherit. And yet, there is Miyazaki.

The theater was packed with kids. I haven't seen a movie with that many munchkins in ages and it added another dimension to the experience. So that's my recommendation: don't just see Ponyo in theaters, see it in an afternoon screening with a horde of squirmy, runny-nosed kids. The clouds will lift.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: L

2009-08-19T22:02:00.006-05:00

We are almost half-way through the alphabet with today's entry brought to you by the letter L. L is a particularly fond letter, I think; a letter that sounds like it is, that produces words that sound so appealingly like they are. Examples: Lilt, lover, light, lace, languor, lattice, leafy, and loathe. This is not a wordsmith site devoted to the love of language (more L words!), however, so I shall pause here with the list (ANOTHER L word).

To stay up with current politics, here is Marlene's definition of author Harper Lee, whose "To Kill a Mockingbird" is discussed this week in The New Yorker regarding some history on Southern liberalism. A good read from Malcolm Gladwell, if anyone is interested in some straying ideas from cinema. But, finally, the reason you came here, Marlene's definition:

Lee, Harper
To Kill a Mockingbird shook me up for a long time. I often think of the children as if they were real. I think of Atticus with the affection one has for the memory of someone one might have married had one known him then.

Sweet of her to send that little love letter to Atticus:

Letters (of Love)
Write them. Otherwise no one will know what wonderful feelings fill you. Even if the king or queen of your heart is unworthy (as you might have been told), write them--it will do you good. Keep copies.

Beaches of Agnes (2009)

2009-08-17T02:23:00.001-05:00

When it comes to movies as affecting as Agnes Varda's Beaches of Agnes (2009) my critical faculties fail me, I become inept, and unfit for the job of writing about film. But if my objective is to delineate the composition of this movie and its narrative construction, I am in luck, complete and utter luck, because Beaches is a film unconcerned with maintaining narrative structure, with trying to prove a clear political point. Beaches is about love and life, simply; beautiful remembrances of the fleeting, the intangible, it is an all-encompassing vision of everything that is wonderful and fearful in life--death and sorrow, liberty and glee.

I arrived home in such a state that time itself ceased to matter. This was a late Sunday night screening, mind you. The work day awaits me in a mere matter of hours, but armed with such optimism as the widowed octoguenarian's in the film tonight, I opted out of the sleazy #22 bus ride home for a walk instead. At home I found a late dinner and a glass of cool wine. The balmy Chicago breeze wafts in through my window, here, at my side, and I adore its caress against my skin between a thin cotton tee. What could ever dissuade one from such simple pleasures after the priviness to an aged and wrought woman's optimism amidst her mournful travails--who yet seeks happy refuge in a fort fashioned as the belly of a whale, colorful swaths of fuschia and turquoise surround her there--of her own husband's death? What audacity could one have to arrive home in a foul mood after watching the eighty-something Agnes Varda tiptoe backwards through a faux beach scene smack in the middle of the Paris streets?

I am talking now to those who have seen the movie. Do you want me to set it up? Do you want a plot synopsis sans spoilers? I'm afraid I can't do it. Head elsewhere if you want that. Today, this is a moment of communal joy. And even if you have not seen The Beaches of Agnes, that's okay too. We can still extol today's seeings together, for, as Agnes says, "While I live, I remember," and you also, even having not seen the film, are alive with your own remembrances. Let us embrace them together. You can later be elucidated by dear Agnes's lightness of being.

Varda's is my favorite kind of film. It's the sort that ponders the pear shaped garden her mother used to keep at her childhood home. It focuses a kid-like gaze upon the world to witness a series of trapeze artists perform on the sandy beach. Agnes lines up next to them in a presentational shot as if to say that in spirit, she is as youthful and buoyant as they. She tells us, "The whole idea of fragmentation appeals to me," as we witness a collage of still, some out-of-focus, images from her days as a photographer; the foreground is blurry while the figures in the background are in focus, flaws, she says, of her early photographic technique that in time she has grown to appreciate. The pursuit of perfection is impossible to achieve in youth.

She leads us further into her life's course. Her friendships with directors Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, with her late husband, Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), for whom the film becomes a dedicated eulogy and passionate expression--her past and memories are inextricably tied to him; she brings him to life through the retelling of their shared stories--and with Chris Marker, seen here through only the facade of his animated cat, he asks her a robotic series of junket questions, "Are you a film buff?" Interspersed are retellings of her time in Nazi occupied Paris when she and her family lived on rations and wore wooden shoes. Strewning fistfuls of hot pink begonias and roses upon her husband's grave, she makes public for the first time very blantantly, his failing battle with AIDS.

She turns on a dime and we see her at the Venice Biennale wearing a potato costume. In an earlier scene she meets the residents of her former home, the husband a toy train collector, a self-proclaimed "trainopath." For every tear that is shed in Agnes's life story there are equal or greater exuberances. She picks through the wares at flea markets, in one scene finding a collector's plate for the Dardennes brothers, another two filmmakers in her circle, that makes this movie as much autobiography as it is an ode to cinema itself. "What is cinema?" she asks. What is so unique about this medium that she is able to jump through time to tell alternatingly fantastic and terrifying stories in one present period? The camera tracks past myriad film awards both she and Demy have won, the Palme d'or, the Golden Lion; she says at the film's finale, "Cinema is my home," and never have we as an audience been so casually in conversation with the filmmaker herself about the one thing we all know intimately well, life.

For the Love of Film and a Few Favorite Trailers

2009-08-16T14:12:00.007-05:00

Hello, Sunday! If you're a film purist, your day is about to get a little brighter. The Los Angeles Times today shares news of certain independent filmmakers' interest in shooting film in place of DV:

It's kind of weird after you spend three years on your project and someone hands you a tape," said Sokol. "You think, 'That's my movie, huh?' All that work feels very small. When you think about it too hard you start to ask, 'What is a movie? Is it this object?'

The whole article is HERE.

In unrelated news, yesterday I found the trailer for Albert Brooks' Real Life (1979) and after watching it three times I've concluded its 3:25 duration is the best 3 minutes and twenty-five seconds of my weekend. The best previews are those that ignore encapsulating an entire movie. How is it possible to tell a complete story in 2 or 3 minutes anyway? Brooks goes the extra mile by presenting a wholly separate comedy vignette, a complete non sequitur:

Another favorite trailer is for Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Simple gasping moments of intrigue where there is only one reaction at its end, the urgent inquiry "What just happened?" If there was ever a more effective trailer that incited me to the theater I don't remember it:

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: K

2009-08-13T23:34:00.004-05:00

In light of the last most palatable post here on Scarlett regarding Julie & Julia (2009), I march forward with Marlene to other kitchen related thoughts using my favorite letter of the alphabet, K.

Ketchup
If you have to kill the taste of what you are eating, pour it on there.

Kitchen
I dislike the modern antiseptic small kitchens. The kitchen should be a place where the family can gather and eat while Mother is cooking*. I venture to say that there is a parallel between the modern American kitchens and the modern American family problems.

Knives
The greatest joy in the kitchen. Keep them sharp.

* See! Isn't Marlene confusing? So progressive, aggressive, and independent, and yet, so...traditional, so conservative.

Julie & Julia (2009)

2009-08-09T22:15:00.000-05:00

Formula!
The thing about formula is that it works. When Julie Powell (Amy Adams) commits to cooking in one year each recipe of Julia Child's indispensable and definitive French cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in Julie & Julia (2009), the cheerful new release from director Nora Ephron, her goal is entirely entangled in her personal life. Concrete goals (to cook all 524 recipes in 365 days) extend to more abstract ones, like forging a healthier bond with her husband, or learning to be less self-involved. To watch Julie pick through the pages of Child's book cooking, with varying degrees of culinary success, the famous Boeuf Bourguignon, is a tad too minimal for a massive summer release, and so enters the queen of narrative formula, Ms. Ephron. As screenwriter of the show, an adaptation from Julie Powell's book of the same name, Ephron pays due diligence to dialogue, where every moment of internal joy or anxiety finds voice. No thought shall go unspoken! could be its calling card. While my younger, more pure, "the movies must be VISUAL" self might have brushed this aside as a kin to "Spoon-Fed Cinema," as a story that rejects all pleas of subtlety and demands that we very banally feel feelings, today I think differently.

Or, I at least am making an exception on behalf of a jubilant picture of specially crafted creative non-fiction. Julie & Julia is super-sweet. I wish a more sophisticated way to say that came naturally to me, but that is simply it, it is just sweet. I'm not sure I have ever been so quick to forgive a film for being so overtly formulaic, but maybe that's because so few films of its type have such overall winningness (I'm talking to you, Steven Spielberg and Schindler's List). In one particular bout of histrionics, Julie's husband Eric (Chris Messina) abandons home after they have an argument. I thought, Aw, you're really leaving over that? Not to spoil the story any further than I already have, but let it suffice to say that it was a moment of sheer movieness (is that a word?), and came at a time in the script that, if you're following Syd Field's rules, conflict, a new plot point, or something awry had to enter to keep the ride moving along at its lofty clip.

Forgive and Forget
The story toggles between two eras, Julia Child's time in Paris during the 1940s and 50s, and Julie's in New York City circa 2002. The picture is brightly lit and decorated, the characters colorfully costumed, like a Disney-fied set of post-9/11 Manhattan and Queens, and post-war Paris, all gleaming like freshly washed linens. The mournful pit of the World Trade Center wreckage is a wide-stride removed from the gruesome devastation of the year prior, and Paris never looked so lush and manicured with its rows of window box flowers, and Julia Child (Meryl Streep) doting over the daily selections of silvery fish, fresh herbs, and bushels of ripe fruits at the street market. It is a carefully planned and cognizant frame of vivaciousness in every sense of the word. Its characters are awake to life and the set drips with props to reflect it: copper pots hang from a kitchen wall, poppy-red lipstick colors Julia's lips, and long stems of yellow French tulips stretch lackadaisically from the edge of a vase--as much characters in their cameo restaurant scene as the matron gourmand is herself the center of the story.

All Hail the Queen
Meryl Streep could not be more charming. I have an issue with a handful of major stars--Streep, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and a few others--with whom I share such familiarity that initially I'm reluctant to believe them as their respective film characters. I had this ambivalence with Streep as the movie began, I kept thinking, Of course she is good, of course she is going to impress me--but will she? Can she really do it again? How great could she possibly be? But those thoughts subsided straight away. Her voice of Julia is uncanny, and her manner so charming I was smiling with a big goofy smile (this silly smile I know well, it's the one I inherited from my mother). Amy Adams' Julie is already damn cute, but when she lay on the floor with a failed try at a stuffed chicken bemoaning the lack of success in her life, our bond was sealed. As for Stanley Tucci, I strain to think of anyone as clever and well-regarded in Hollywood as he. He plays serious emotion alternating with perfect comic spells effortlessly as Julia's husband, Paul Child, who, I should add, is also wonderfully outfitted, including the particularly classy addition of a turquoise ring on his finger. There is a lot to appreciate in the details of this movie.

The Look of Things
At the fore of my mind when the show began was how Ephron's shots would be composed. A couple of years ago David Bordwell completed a great sequence analysis in Ephron's remake of The Shop around the Corner (Lubitsch, 1940), her 1998 release You've Got Mail. His analysis has been referenced before, and a fuller delineation of this thoughts are outlined in one of the most approachable books on film I've yet to read, his The Way Hollywood Tells It. In sum, Bordwell shows us that the more extended two-shot takes in The Shop around the Corner are broken into multiple single shots in You've Got Mail of the same scene. In doing this, the multitude of shots disconnects the characters from their natural space, showing, ultimately a short-sightedness in how the original setup of film space is able to convey the same piece of story without overabundance of single shot splices. So my eyes were open when I watched Julie & Julia--would there be more of this same short ASL aesthetic? While I think a second viewing is in order before I can say so definitively, I did notice a concerted use of longer takes, many of which use a dolly or crane to follow the action amidst specific portions of the set. Shots following Julie through her apartment and into her cramped kitchen were the most prevalent, or at least the most noticeable to me. There are more that I hope others of you will be able to help me recall.

Feed Me
All of this is to say nothing of the film as a gift to the foodie. Action fans had Transformers this summer, and so, Gourmet magazine readers receive Julie & Julia. An early scene in the film of bruschetta making sent me directly to my kitchen this morning for preparation of a mixture of my own multicolored tomatoes and basil concoction (which has deliciously doubled as both my lunch and dinner today). Sometimes a good piece of bread and a sincere reverence for cheese is all you need. Alright, and a splash of wine too.

Bon appetit!

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: J

2009-08-07T21:12:00.002-05:00

Marlene, she says it like it is:

Jargon
Something one should use only after one has learned the legitimate language fully.

In The Loop (2009)

2009-08-02T17:31:00.008-05:00

Taking a page from Mr. Singer and his "Briefly" series over at the Termite Art blog, this post shall be short and sweet. It concerns what is so far my second-favorite movie of the summer, director Armando Iannucci's In The Loop (2009), a deliciously funny film about the absurdity of daily political operations and its incumbent indefatigable characters. Most worthy of notice, is Anna Chlumsky, who I will assume everyone from my generation remembers fondly from the My Girl series in the early 1990s that starred Macaulay Culkin at her side. She's grown up now, but has maintained every bit of onscreen exuberance she delighted audiences with then. I love her. I can't wait to see more of her. I feel like this is a rare occurence when a young actress is so precious and unpretentious onscreen that I'm longing for her to reappear again in the next scene. Anna comes with a history working to her advantage, of course, that made me curious to watch her because I couldn't believe my eyes that it really was her. But as the shock wore off that, yes, she is a regular player in this film like any other of the smashingly exciting characters of In The Loop, she flat-out enraptured me with her performance. She spoke authoritatively and transparently; she is a starlet all her own, she has grown into her skin in a way that other young actresses--Lindsay Lohan comes to mind--didn't have a chance to do because they never departed from the screen for a prolonged hiatus. Now we get to enjoy her anew, without any of the baggage of those troublesome early twenties on the cover of Us Weekly. And to add just one more line to this correspondence, dear reader, about the movie on its own, I laughed from start to finish outloud.

If time weren't so pressing these days, I'd be tempted to see it in the theater again.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: I is for Italy

2009-07-25T17:38:00.003-05:00

The women behind the scenes of Scarlett are in up to their elbows with various and sundry tasks at the moment, but do not stray far. We will be back shortly, in the next couple of days, I hope, with more to share. While we wait, we shant sit idly ("Idleness: It is a sin to do nothing," Marlene warns). Ms. Dietrich has ideas about Italy. I dedicate these to my wonderful Italian friend. Salute!

Italia
Beauty everywhere.

Italian Men
Beautiful "hot air."

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: H

2009-07-15T23:34:00.003-05:00

Hitchcock, Alfred
When he directs it seems as if he didn't. But he does, he does, and how he does!

Year One (2009)

2009-07-12T14:29:00.003-05:00

How could a movie starring Jack Black and Michael Cera, and directed by comedy veteran-of-veterans Harold Ramis go wrong? Somehow, it did. I have decided to withhold all critical judgment because my theory is Year One went through a gauntlet of recuts before it finally made it to the screen (it was cut from an R to a PG-13). The story was choppy and progressed hastily, so much that by as little as 10 minutes into the movie I felt stretched thin in multiple directions. Black's disownership from his home village happened just as we got a feel for his role there. Paul Rudd's Abel is slaughtered by David Cross's Cain a swift few minutes later, which happens in a manner just a hair too uncomfortable to be funny. There are so many cameos (e.g. Bill Hader, Kyle Gass) and side characters (e.g. Ramis as Adam, Horatio Sans as Enmebaragesi, even Paul Rudd) that it's impossible to keep them all footed solidly in a story that's sinking beneath their feet. To say it simply, the movie wasn't whole.

About midway through there is a scene where Black and Cera are invited to become guards in the city of Sodom; it's evening and they exit the room, presumably to go through the next step of being initiated and suited up. But the next scene after the cut is in the broad daylight of the next morning. I call out this section in particular, not because there isn't plausible narrative causality, but because there was a distinct halt in momentum between the two scenes, like something clever had happened in a bridging scene that was left on the cutting room floor. You could literally see the recuts happen. Or, could Year One just be a poorly written and constructed movie? That's altogether possible, I suppose, but Harold Ramis is just too good to accept that theory unquestioned.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: G

2009-07-10T23:06:00.001-05:00

Grant, Cary
The champion.

Maborosi (1995)

2009-07-08T20:35:00.005-05:00

I'm at the age now that when I look at a release date of a movie from the 1990s I automatically pause to think of what I was watching at my age then. In the case of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Maborosi that was released in 1995, the movie I think of is Clueless. Being 15-years-old in 1995 there was no way of knowing about Maborosi. There was never even a trace of it on the horizon until perhaps a couple of years ago. 1995 is the year of Clueless and Die Hard: With a Vengeance for me. I think more than any other movies from that specific time, those are the two I know best. Looking now at Maborosi it has a look that seems out of time. The basic, unstylized scenery could be set anytime in the past twenty or so years. The first images came on screen and I stopped to ask myself, When was this made? I was operating under the assumption that this was released, rather narcissistically, within the past five years, as if this cinema did not exist until I came to the age when I discovered it personally. Finally, though, the quality of the image told me it was older. Simpler color schemes and the deep shadows of figures against bright backdrops looked nothing like the digital quality of recent DV movies, but seemed to anticipate them. Maborosi looks like it's on the cusp of that new technology, leaning close to the edge of high-def camera work.

Shadows in digital images don't always look like shadows. Too much light makes dark registers brighter, compensating for film's implacable need for high wattage exposure. Maborosi is a movie filled with a lot of shadows. If compositionally we think of film as literal plays of light and shadow, Kore-eda's film is an overt example of that. Nothing in it is muted or neutral. There is a distinct balance--a real yin-yang--of dark and light. The sea is painted deep blue and black against the auburn and ochre shade of the hillside and the overcast white of the sky. Its characters often move across the screen like deep abstractions of unexposed black in the frame. Or, the inverse: a figure might be illuminated by a slash of light across her face--the only blot of light marked within an otherwise dark frame of film. All of this is not to say there is a lack of depth in the compositions either. There is still a fullness and texture to a shot of a darkened room in which its details are hardly visible. A real film print might reveal many more of those compositional intricacies.

To the point, Maborosi's primary characteristic is its abundance of depth, concerning both its main character, a woman who cannot reconcile her new life with the exhausting mystery of her husband's suicide; and, as detailed above, in its rich visual texture, which is shown most profoundly in an image of the woman's two children running along a lake shore in long shot, their darkened reflections bobbing along at their sides. At the halfway point of the film I struggled to recall a single closeup. This is a movie made in long shot almost exclusively, offering it extra opportunities to display that signature depth of focus. It is structured with a series of establishing shots that introduce us to and remind us of the places these characters have been. It's a simple queue of maybe a dozen or so locations: the house by the sea, the coffee shop, the factory, the stairwell, the alley, the street of the woman's home before her husband's death. It is an effective way to display the interior and ineffable memories she has of her past life. The glance at these locales is a simple reminder that those are places that have personal meaning. That is all, but that is also everything.

But to return to my original thought about its release date, 1995, my impressionable year of Clueless, Maborosi has the opposite resonance to me than that movie of my late formative years. Their stories and cultural landscapes are obvious departures from one another. Stylistically and technically these two films are drastically removed from one another too. Maborosi, with its emphasis on long-shot landscapes looks like a painting; Clueless, with its quicker cutting and neon color palate looks akin to a video game (or as Cher says herself, like a Noxema commercial). Marborosi is far less artificially manipulated: a snow storm occurs in real time, commuter trains pass on their tracks, not as simple b-roll footage, but as live components of the frame, as captures of ephemerality that are inexorable from the film's planned texture.

It's a strange comparison, but Clueless is so much the opposite of that. I wonder how two movies so disparate could come out of the same time. As many years have gone by since as I was total years old when I first saw Clueless, Die Hard, and come to think of another one, Batman Forever. Still, it seems, my 15-year-old self's tastes are intact (two-thirds of those movies remain a couple of my favorites of all time), I've just been enriched a little more.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: F

2009-07-04T20:17:00.003-05:00

F is for Fourth of July--and I say, happy Independence Day, everyone! Quite appropriate for this day, I give you madame Dietrich's definition of...

Freedom
The execution of self-imposed duties proves freedom.

Food, Inc. (2009)

2009-06-29T00:42:00.001-05:00

When I moved to Philadelphia for a brief hiatus from post-graduate life in Denver in 2002, which was at that point the only major city I had come to know intimately, I wanted to experience something new. Wiping the slate clean, I left for northeast Philadelphia on a one-way flight with two suitcases of belongings. I knew no one in the city except for a handful of extended family members in the suburbs, so it would be up to me to navigate this neighborhood, a place called Port Richmond, the place where both my parents were born and raised within six blocks of one another, and where my ailing grandmother kept a house while she resided in Colorado with my parents.

Her empty home was my ticket to Port Richmond. In its heyday, the neighborhood was an eastern European enclave of row homes with movie theaters every few blocks, clothing stores, shoe stores, and candy shops; now it was quickly falling victim to poor infrastructure and declines in local businesses. There were still a few shops--mostly Polish butchers and bakeries--left in the area when I arrived, but the elderly population that had been living there for the past 60 years or more were dying out. Almost all of their kids, the generation that includes both my parents, had a long time ago abandoned the area for the western or northern suburbs.

Outside of a local 24-hour restaurant, the Aramingo Diner that touts the best cheesecake in Philly, and an IHOP, there were not many places to dine out. About eight or so blocks to the west at the El station at Kensington and Allegheny Avenues--"K&A," a corner of the city that, depending on the time of day, looked like an abandoned demilitarized zone--you could find fast food places selling fried chicken; and greasy hoagie and pizza joints were scattered every few blocks from there eastward, too. In short, Port Richmond, Philadelphia is an economically depressed area that offers few options for healthful diversions (its parks and sidewalks lay mostly in disrepair, especially the further westward you travel), and even fewer for healthful dining. One of the first things I noticed in my mail delivery was an Acme supermarket flyer advertising buy-one-get-one-free promotions on Oreo cookies, Doritos, and 2-liter bottles of Coke or Pepsi. If the people of Richmond and the surrounding neighborhoods are on a tight budget, I wondered then, how could they afford anything else but this kind of food?

The reason for this backstory leads me to my afternoon yesterday that was spent watching Robert Kenner's new documentary Food, Inc., where this, one of the film's many points was reiterated to me: fresh vegetables and fruits have become a luxury of a more financially stable class. You don't necessarily have to be rich to buy a bunch of broccoli, but as the Burger King-fed family of four in the film demonstrated, the price of those green, healthful bunches buys them more "filling" food like chips and soda in their place. And if the dusty abandon of Richmond's Acme produce section (at least how I left it in 2003) is a measure of how people are forced to eat, there is a national health epidemic in the U.S.

In a lot of ways the revelation of facts in Food, Inc. is not that revelatory. I am not the only one who has come of age and noticed the discrepancies between supermarkets' promotional products and what its customers need. Getting more for your money is the calling card of the working class, but that motto is ingrained widely in collective American thought too. It's a matter of cheapness, not quality. It's a matter of seeing things in terms of volume, rather than in measures of what's actually needed. This mentality isn't limited to the food industry either. If you've ever been to the Gap and found multiples of a $40 t-shirt on the clearance rack for $6.99 you can see this clothing behemoth operates under the same business model. It's a very American thing to make sure we have a lot of something, regardless of need or quality. So many corporations wouldn't be in business if this was not the case.

Yet as Food, Inc. helpfully reminds us, there are plenty of people who have no alternatives to the fast foods and junk foods on promotion. People have to eat. When the privatization of food sales is narrowed to five or less companies countrywide, as the beef, pork, chicken, and corn industries are in the U.S., the gargantuan supplies they are able to produce must be sold. And so, those genetically modified foods get marked down and the health of the consumer, some of whom have few or no alternative products in their economic reach, suffers. A Belarusian woman who I made friends with during my stay in Philly told me a saying she has in her country: "I'm not rich enough to buy cheap things," meaning, as a working class woman, she didn't have enough money to buy products that needed to be repeatedly replaced because they were made with sub par materials, or were constructed poorly. The ideal being that you spend money on a few good things and you have them for a long time, perhaps a lifetime. It's an investment. And if the long-term benefits of a healthy diet mean people have more energy, feel better, and get sick less, it is about time we think of our food in the same way.

How we concretely resolve this issue is, however, something only lightly touched upon by the film. On the one hand, it's wonderful to see a documentary that lifts the veil from this superpower exhibited so widely, on over 50 screens in its second weekend; that means the message is getting out to audiences that are historically unlikely to see a documentary at all, let alone for ten dollars or more on the big screen. On the other hand, there is something redundant and boring about the spoon-fed nature of the documentary's structure. As discussed with my movie companion yesterday, this kind of documentary is becoming a genre in its own right. It's the sort that proceeds with a multitude of stories that can somehow only be connected with separate introductory titles on a black screen. Personally, I admire documentaries that simply begin. The Maysles brothers and D.A. Pennebaker perfected this art, and they did it just by turning on the camera to begin a scene. There doesn't have to be a didactic link pointing us from one scene to the next; modern film audiences have come to understand the edited course of time to know when they've moved from one topic to the next in a different space.

There was a recent Frontline episode that covered a similar topic as Food, Inc.'s in greater depth, where their investigation unfolded organically and quite engagingly. While I don't expect a popular documentary to be written with the intellectual rigor of a Frontline special, I still hope that in its colloquiality it can cover all of its highly-related main topics in one narrative arc. When Food, Inc.'s momentum was halted by the numerous and distracting fade-to-blacks, it seemed like a shot of one of its primary authorities, Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) could have easily bridged the gaps with further dialogue. And perhaps because of this jerky structure, Food, Inc. never covered one point in enough depth to help incite real, concrete action from its audience. It seemed instead like a well put together public service announcement, never answering the question: What does the average consumer do to demand healthful change?

Chipping away at this cause individually is truly a self-defeating action, which is why Food, Inc. was a lost opportunity to discuss the needed proliferation of local farming operations, both urban and rural, that would be able to sustain communities across the nation without an oppressive conglomerate.

A couple of years ago I worked briefly with filmmaker Judith Helfand on just this issue, local urban farming that sustains small populations in low-income communities. In our work together we met urban farmers whose goal was to grow produce and sell it from a truck that makes its rounds daily through the neighborhood. These are areas on the south side of Chicago that have no access to a Whole Foods, or even the more affordable Trader Joe's. It would provide people in disadvantaged areas of the south side with fresh organic herbs and vegetables instead of corner convenience store foodstuffs like chips, candy and other processed foods. Food, Inc. comes close to addressing the benefit of these farms with the gleeful introduction of Virginia-based organic farmer Joel Salatin. His customers drive from as far as 300 miles away for a fresh chicken, and he admits he isn't sure how he'd maintain the integrity of his farming methods if an increase in demand took hold. This was an immediate entrance for Kenner to discuss the implementation of many local farms per area, versus using only one that keeps consumers stagnant in our current food production system, keeping organic food out of reach from working class people.

This is one of Food, Inc.'s missed chances at depth of subject matter rather than breadth, and the movie ends quietly. A fade to black with a new round of dissolving title cards concludes the show with a web address I can't remember. Then again, if each night's audience goes home to prepare a healthy dinner in place of delivery, maybe its mission has been accomplished. But that pat on the back will hardly suffice in the long run. What happens next?