In The Company Of Glenn

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.

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?

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.

Alternate readings in film, #1

So I was at the gym this afternoon and on one of its many boxes was TNT, which was showing James Cameron's crude, crass, and in several respects rather diverting 1995 True Lies, and it struck me that, up until the film's final minutes, it could be viewed as a rousing account of Art Malik's existential triumphs over his own receding hairline.

This is what it's like, in case you were wondering, to be a perpetually balding man.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: Special Tom O'Neil VS. Eureka!/Masters of Cinema Edition: 'Sunrise'

I don't need to do research on why Sunrise is so highly regarded. I know that point of view and happen to disagree with it strongly. Isn't that permitted? Of course not. Groupthink is ruthlessly enforced in the film realm. That's what I mean when I refer to "Oscar Nazis"...

—Tom O'Neil, The Envelope/Gold Derby, April 16, 2008

2: Film Credits/ 4: Restoration Notes, by David Pierce (2003)/ 6: "A Song of Two Humans": F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, by R. Dixon Smith (2004)/ 10:The American Debut, by Lotte H. Eisner (1944)/ 24: A False Dawn, by Robin Wood (1998)/ 35: City/Country, by Lucy Fischer (1996)/ 40: DVD credits

—Table of Contents, booklet, Eureka!/Masters of Cinema DVD, Sunrise, 1927, F.W. Murnau

'Sunrise' semester, and/or, Dave Kehr, King of the Hipsters

"Hope Glenn Kenny gets a hold of this," Keith Uhlich writes over at The House Next Door's Links For The Day, apropos Oscar-watch-dude Tom O'Neil's, shall we say, contrarian perspective on F.W. Murnau's Sunrise. Apparently O'Neil can't get on the bus with certain "Oscar Nazis" (there's a phrase that ought not be dwelt upon, not to mention even ever uttered) who "insist that we should fight for Sunrise to get its due and reverse the common misconception that the lowly Wings was the first best picture winner," because, by O'Neil's light, Sunrise is "paper thin, hilariously schmaltzy" and its "three primary characters are cartoonish clichés and their performances 3-inch slices of honeyed ham."

Janet Gaynor and George O'Brien in Murnau's Sunrise

Now I'm flattered that Keith thinks I'm the go-to guy when an ignorant, vulgar, hubristic critic is in need of an evisceration. But I'm afraid I can't help him here, because, truth to tell, I think O'Neil's kind of got a point.

Friday afternoon palate cleanser, with a sneak preview of an all-new quiz!!

All right, kids, break it up. Kyle Smith, or somebody who says he's Kyle Smith, wants all y'all to stop piling up on him, get jobs, and move on. Well, I'm moving on. But to what? A friend has convinced me to work up an annotated filmography of Steve Erickson's movie-mad novel Zeroville...and that's gonna take a while. My Monday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report is for, well, Monday morning...and it is of a five-disc set that I'm not quite finished with. Another project in the works was suggested back in January by one "Tony Verizon," commenting on my "Antonioni or Thunderbirds?" quiz. "You could do a nice series on 'Dragnet or Bresson?'"

Agreed. Only it's harder than you might think. And right now I've only got DVDs of Dragnet '67, the color series, which I have to desaturate if I'm gonna contrast it to a B&W Bresson image. Still. The concept holds promise. This duo of screen grabs is probably too easy, but it gives a little of the overall flavor we should achieve....

I:

II:

Like I said, promising. And now back to that five-disc set...

There will be dumb. (Updated, and updated again.)

"It's one of the cleverest left-wing films made in a long time. But apart from its trenchant critiques of capitalism and religion, there's also an underlying theme you wouldn't suspect in a liberal movie."

Um, okay, whatever you say. I never thought that There Will Be Blood carried any particular political brief; as my own posts on the film attest, I consider the film's concerns to be deeper and more primordial than what the terms "liberal" and "conservative" encompass, but, if Pajamas Media wants to commemorate the DVD release of Paul Thomas Anderson's film by pointing out its, um, conservative values, it causes me no harm.

Except for the fact that Kyle Smith, the New York Post film reviewer making a brief for the film's conservative credentials, hasn't the faintest idea of what he's talking about, and is apparently incapable of "reading" a film, that is, comprehending what a film is telling via visual and not spoken language.

Here is the passage in Smith's, um, critique, that reveals he hasn't the faintest idea of what he's talking about.

Plainview first shows some humanity when he cradles his infant son while a mine turns into a gushing oil well before our eyes. Without a word being spoken, it’s clear that Daniel’s painful sacrifices are partly driven by his love for his son, whose mother never appears and whom Daniel never voluntarily discusses (although he will later claim she died in childbirth — his wavering glance tells us this is a lie — to a housewife whose property he needs for oil exploration).

Now by this point in time, the critical exegesises of the film have all pretty much gotten straight with the truth of Plainview's relationship with H.W.; that is—SPOILER ALERT!!—that H.W. is not, in fact, Plainview's son as advertised, but is in fact the orphaned child of a co-worker or employee of Plainview's who was killed in an oil derrick accident. In the comments section of Smith's Pajamas Media article, a few people point this out, and in response, a commenter calling himself "Anonymous" (that's really not nearly as creative as Sprezzatura, dude) demurs:

To those who suppose the boy (seen at the beginning being cradled by another man) is not Plainview’s son, obviously I don’t see it the same way. One man can of course hold another man’s boy.

To pilfer from another blog, sadly, no. The story as told in visual language is incredibly clear that the baby who grows up to be H.W. belongs to another man on Plainview's crew. It's not arguable. Below the fold, some screen grabs (not too many, as I don't want Stu VanAirsdale to make fun of me again) and explication.

Singing songs of 'Iron Man' and 'Racer X'

I must say I'm kind of tickled that they use Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" in the trailer for Jon Favreau's Robert-Downey-Jr.-starring blockbuster comic book adaptation Iron Man.

It's funny, because, among other things, Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" has nothing to do with Tony Stark or any such thing. Black Sabbath grew up in Birmingham, England, an area so poor that comic books did not exist therein. Have you ever listened to the lyrics of "Iron Man"? No, of course not. Not many people have. The then-almost-ten-year-old son of a friend did once, or rather, many times, until he got the gist of it. The song's story line is kind of like that of Bowie's "Space Oddity," only in this version Major Tom returns to DESTROY THE WORLD!!! Or something. Actually, the movie the song's lyrics most vividly evoke is H.G. Lewis' Monster A-Go-Go, in which a returning-from-space astronaut, hideously mutated, breaks up some teen dance parties. I dunno. The Wikipedia entry on it is of the impression that it's much more complicated.

The point is, Sabbath's "Iron Man" is so irrelevant to the matter at hand that they might as well include Eric Dolphy's "Iron Man" on the soundtrack to the film proper as well.

There's no video of Dolphy doing "Iron Man," so this'll do. Can't you just see Chris Rock playing Dolphy in a biopic? Damn, where's Spike Lee's number...

I suppose it's too much to hope that this song, not to mention the immortal line, "Just a goddamn job," turn up in Speed Racer...