In The Company Of Glenn

Follow for now...

Until further notice, or maybe for the duration, I will be blogging at a website of my own, which I have decided to call..."Some Came Running."

Here is the link:

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/

Let's hang there for a bit. Could be fun. Thanks.

The end of an era

I've just been informed that my position at Premiere.com is being terminated. What this means for this blog is still up in the air; I've got meetings this afternoon in which such things are to be negotiated. In any case, I now join the ever-growing ranks of film critics without staff positions. I very much hope to keep this blog going...and get some good freelance work, quick. Anybody with ideas in this area should contact me at glennkenny@mac.com.

Hope to be in touch again soon. Thank you, you're the best goddamn audience a blogger could ever have.

Jimmy Giuffre, 1921-2008

In music, space and time are linked in ways that don't apply to any of the other arts. The spaces between notes occur in time; the qualities of the sound as heard are largely dependent on the physical space in which the music is played. Certain kinds of music are more explicitly "about" these kinds of connections than others.

The music created by Jimmy Giuffre, whose primary instruments were soprano saxophone and clarinet, alongside pianist Paul Bley and bassist Steve Swallow, took me on some of the most pleasurable explorations of space and time that I've ever experienced, and taught me how to better intuit the foldings of space and time as applied in the other arts, film among them.

Criterion working Blu

I can't find any confirmation of this on the Criterion site itself yet, but according to the home page of the great site DVD Beaver, the great label will introduce its Blu-Ray line in October, and the introductory titles will be The Third Man, Bottle Rocket, Chungking Express, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Last Emperor, El Norte, The 400 Blows, Gimme Shelter, The Complete Monterey Pop, Contempt, Walkabout, For All Mankind and The Wages of Fear.

This is huge. Criterion does an astonishing job in Standard Definition—I'll put my Criterion Days of Heaven up against just about any High-Definition format disc I've seen—so the mere prospect of what they'll do in High Def has me drooling. Good God. Contempt. Walkabout. Chungking. Christmas will be early this year.

Department of Redundant DVD Package Design Department

You really know a studio's behind a film when it comes up with a powerful, original design for the DVD package of the picture...

Yeesh! And the Weinstein Company's not even recycling an in-house design—Eastern Promises is a Universal pic...

Ah, hell, what do I care as long as the Weinsteins keep putting out great DVDs of those Samuel Bronston pictures...

My verdict on the so-called 'Jimi Hendrix Sex Tape,' in case you're interested

Hendrix by Pennebaker, Jimi Plays Monterey, The Criterion Collection

Short version, in case you're not interested in the squalid details:

Boy, that guy is so not Jimi Hendrix that it's almost funny.

Long version with squalid details after the jump.

(Mostly) Viewing Diary, May 1-5

May 1:

The day is spent looking at Blu-Ray versions of varied non-masterpieces. I do a column over at the website proper rating High-Definition DVDs, and while my first couple of installments were pretty much release-date-non-specific, it's now at the point where some semblance of timeliness counts. Last month's Warner release of an excellent Blu-Ray of Bonnie and Clyde was the sort of thing I'd like to see more of, but this month I've got to keep a sharp eye on, and apply some wit to the evaluation of, such not-inordinately distinguished titles as The Devil's Own and


Alvin and The Chipmunks. "Why The Devil's Own?" I think. "I can come up with at least three Alan J. Pakula films I'd sooner see on Blu-Ray than this." (And you can, too, I'm sure—mine were All the President's Men, Klute, and The Parallax View.) But, Devil's Own is, like so many Pakula pictures, shot by Gordon Willis. This plays very much in favor of the Blu-Ray disc—my evaluations skew to the technical side, for many reasons, not least of which being I've always hated DVD reviews that were just film reviews in disguise.

By evening I'm Blu-Rayed out, and, waiting for My Lovely Wife to get home, decide to treat myself by chacking out a couple of the new Universal Cinema Classics discs. A Mitchell Leisen double feature: 1937's Easy Living, starring Jean Arthur, Edward Arnold, and Ray Milland, directed by Leisen from a Preston Sturges script, and 1934's 1939's Midnight, starring Don Ameche, Claudette Colbert, and John Barrymore, directed by Leisen from a script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.

Ameche and Colbert in Midnight

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'The River'

This is one of those discs that, for some film lovers, is in and of itself the justification for a purchase of a multi-region DVD player. (Although, to get a little technical here, the region coding of the disc—region 0—is not the roadblock to playback on a U.S. player. It's the PAL braodcast standard, which multi-region players also conquer.) A loving restoration of a once-thought-lost film...a fantastic window on the work of an underrepresented-on-DVD film artist...supplemented by an eye-opening piece of movie scholarship and topped with a sampling of the film artist's revelatory early work, the Edition Filmmuseum presentation of Frank Borzage's The River is like some cinephilic dream made plastic.

Help and/or money wanted

There is a substantial, but not unlimited, amount of time available in which to develop a Turtles/Flo and Eddie biopic as a vehicle for these two fellows.
Anyone with eyes can tell you it's an opportunity that doesn't come along every day. From tripping out with McGuinn as they craft their recording of "You Showed Me" to whining about De La Soul ruining the song by sampling it and then suing them, and beyond, these two can portray every wrinkle of the tale. Who's with me? Or better still, just wants to give me seed money?

'Jean-Luc Godard embraces, then renounces, the dance': a tale told in screen caps.

An experimental would-be contribution to Ferdy on Film's "Invitation to a Dance" blogathon begins below the fold.

The Rosenbaum Archive

...sounds like it could be the name of a Robert Ludlum novel, no? Or not. If you weren't aware of it already, know now that former Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, now retired, has a website where he's archiving his voluminous, and voluminously smart and provocative, film writing. He writes that he hopes the site "will grow and sprout more features in the weeks and months ahead," and so do I, but what he's got up already is, as they say, cherce, so check it out.

J.R.'s foray into not-quite blogging, along with Ray Young's abrupt shutdown of Flickhead and the great Matt Zoller Seitz's bowing out of both print and online movie writing, has touched off a few ruminations on this movie-blogging life, from Dave Kehr, David Hudson, and most intriguingly of all, Tim Lucas. I've been a follower of Tim since before he began Video Watchdog magazine, and when he started blogging a few years back—blogging brilliantly, I might add—I just didn't know how he found the time. Still don't. Turns out he's not so sure these days.

Carroll Gardens twilight, with drizzle

This is a thing I've never known before...

...it's called Easy Living.

Sorry. I've been holed up all day, watching Blu-Ray discs for May's High-Definition DVD Consumer Guide, and this is the best I've got.

And by "best I've got," I mean the facile linking of a classic Mitchell Leisen film, scripted by Preston Sturges and starring Jean Arthur and Edward Arnold, to one of the most lumpen dumbfuck (and incidentally, when I say "dumbfuck" I really mean, um, "dumbfuck"—seriously, these yoyos made Deep Purple look like the Arditti String Quartet) hair-rock combos of the early 1970s, to wit:

Like I said. Best I've got. The Leisen film is one of Universal's latest four (the other three are Leisen's Brackett-and-Wilder-scripted Midnight, She Done Him Wrong, and Wilder's directorial debut The Major and the Minor) in its one-time "Studio Classics," now "Cinema Classics" editions, and it looks great, and you should get it.

The greatest films never made

Eddie Constantine in Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville

I learn from Richard Brody's new book Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, that prior to settling on Alphaville with him, Godard wanted American expat tough-guy portrayer Eddie Constantine to play the lead role in an adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend.

The mind fairly boggles at the notion: Jean-Luc Godard's I Am Legend, starring Eddie Constantine.

What are your favorite unrealized movies, in the mode of this, or, say, David Lean's Nostromo? There are hundreds out there, for sure...

On a side note, it's pretty droll how Lou Reed has turned into such an Eddie Constantine lookalike in recent years, no?

Cannes Countdown: The Competition (updated)

Being a subjective, not entirely well-informed, and hopefully not pre-judging bunch of observations on the pictures in competition at the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival, May 14-25...

'Three Monkeys,' directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

"I figured it would appeal to you...formalists," a friend said with only mild sarcasm when explaining why he was colder than the rest of his dinner companions after Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates screened in Cannes back in 2006. Well, yes and no. Turkish actor/director Ceylan's work has been compared to that of Antonioni and Tarkovsky, but while I don't think he ever reaches those filmmakers' highs, his perspective on romantic anomie has some new flavors that are well worth sampling. Ceylan's also got a pleasingly mordant sense of humor, on display in a very messed-up adulterous sex scene at Climates' center. The title's three monkeys, as can be inferred from the film's minimal website, are the ones not sensing any evil. As this is Ceylan's followup to Climates, us formalists are very much looking forward to it.

A new episode in the saga of 'Porn to Mainstream'...

This morning's Variety brings official news about a project I've been hearing about for almost a year: The Girlfriend Experience, a digital pic to be directed by Stephen Soderbergh from a script by my buds Brian Koppelman and David Levien. The film will explore a relatively recent twist in the world's oldest profession, wherein the encounter sometimes referred to as a "trick" provides not merely sex, but a simulacurum of a perfect romantic relationship.

Now some have argued that this very idea is inimical to the whole client/prostitute thingie, that the whole point of such a transaction is to achieve the wham-bam or happy ending with as little fuss as possible; on the other hand...

But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Michael Fleming's report notes, "Rather than go for star power, Soderbergh may set an adult film actress to play the lead role." No names have gone public yet, but among those I understand are on a wish list is an adult starlet who recently cited Catherine Breillat as a hero of hers. (They're starting to make 'em different these days—one of this starlet's contemporaries likes to drop Descartes during interviews.) If that works out, the set of Girlfriend Experience ought to be one of the more interesting ones of the fall, and the never-ending-saga of the porn-to-mainstream performer will have an intriguing new chapter...

A spot of color

Damn, I've been running a lot of black-and-white screen caps lately. People are gonna start to think this is a blog about old movies or something.

To remedy, here's Dean Martin in an iconic (some would say seminal) image from Vincente Minnelli's great 1958 Some Came Running, to remind you that the long-awaited domestic DVD version of this influential picture streets on May 13, from your friends at Warner Home Video.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'Letter From An Unknown Woman'

What, exactly, is melodrama? That question came up as I read the Self-Styled Siren's provocative post "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs: A Brief Defense of Melodrama," which itself was inspired a bit by the recent cinema blogosphere fulminations and such on behalf of Murnau's Sunrise.

Sunrise, like a lot of the other melodramas of its period, plays it straight. It's not crude, but it is about creating a galvanic effect. The genre has its stealth uses, of course, as the exquisitely ironic work of Douglas Sirk has shown.

And then there's Max Ophuls.