The View Beyond Parallax? more reads for week of February 24 ...

The only links page that matters? except for all the others.

The Seattle screening highlights have been given their own page: see the Parallax View of the Seattle Cinema Scene here.

?Here?s a guy who wants to do things differently? Here is a guy who is brave.? ?The guy,? referring to Nigerian filmmaker Kunle Afolayan, striving for bigger budgets and their attendant professionalism, yearning to play on the same field as any international director; the ?things? to Nigeria?s film industry, a bustling, populist- and piracy-driven market that, as Andrew Rice describes it, recreates the legally muddled, hard-nosed but temptingly free-for-all conflicts of the early days of Hollywood overlooked in most current nostalgia for the times. Accompanied ?by a slideshow.

Another slap to the face of rosy Hollywood self-regard could have been Michael Mann and John Logan?s unfilmed noir set during, and amidst, the filming of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. At least as Matthew Dessem tells it.

Nostalgia gets unpacked further at the Movie Morlocks: ?David Kalat argues its appeal is partly why we?ve been getting the history of silent comedy wrong from the start?a start he convincingly places in 1949, year of Mack Sennett?s compilation film Down Memory Lane and Agee?s celebrated Life article on ?Comedy?s Greatest Era.? While Kimberly Lindbergs looks back at Movie Love, an early-50?s comic book consisting of movie adaptations and star bios. Which seems a history one could skip unearthing until you come across that nearly perfect combination of subject and artist: Burt Lancaster as drawn by Frank Frazetta.

?That?s what movies do. It?s the only dramatic art form that allows you to look deeply into someone?s eyes without freaking them out.??Video artist Josh Melnick and Walter Murch find a wealth to discuss in the blink of an eye. Link via the Cinetrix, who spins off from Murch?s aside that all movie history might be dependent on trains with a delightful collection of videos.

Kate Brooks presents a portfolio of photographs she took in 2006 of dissident Syrian filmmakers. That they are seen not mid-exhortation, but relaxing at a cafe, makes their bravery resonate all the more.

?As all other social guidelines fail, like politics and religion, for instance, cinema is more than ever a mirror of our times, and is giving us answers, at least every now and then.? Wim Wenders keeps the faith, even as it expands now to shooting in 3D, as evinced by his interview with Tim Moore.

?I mean, if you ask me to compare The Lives of Others to Porky?s II, well that is a little out of my pay-grade really. But I will like them equally if they achieve what they set out to do.? On the other hand, John Malkovich, interviewed at The Talks, seems to have come to a more disinterested serenity with age.

Mystical yet tightly controlled, experimental yet narrative; Dennis Lim praises the uncategorizable work of filmmaker Nina Menkes.

?Tierney?s own beauty was also somewhat static, except for certain moments when her eyes would flicker with something close to instability. She was like an exquisite porcelain doll with a hairline crack in it, a flaw, or a missing component.? It?s not like Stanwyck is the only legend Dan Callahan can write beautifully and insightfully about, you know. At Sight & Sound he treasures the flaws that make Gene Tierney shine all the more; and at The Chiseler he mourns the loss of Gene Raymond?s ?cheerful advertising of his own off-kilter sexiness,? gone from movie screens after his arrests, even as he praises the stoicism with which Raymond replaced it.

David Cairns is right that there is, if anything, a surfeit of cinematic Fausts; but he still makes Autant-Lara?s Marguerite de la niut sound like a particularly intriguing variation.

Linda Darnell

?If I was you I?d show more of what I got. Maybe wear something with beads.? ?What I got don?t need beads.? The Self-Styled Siren praises the goodness that made Linda Darnell such a memorable bad girl.

?In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much. But it was impossible to see too much.? Bill Morris catches up with three recent books?by DeLillo, Lethem, and Dyer?that look, then look closely, then look again at select movies. Noted by Movie City News.

?Hot Sheets/Leg Candy/Leg Magic/Feel Tight/Partition Magic ([V]ehicles for Sharon Stone?.)? Stanley Kubrick?s assistant Tony Frewin provides a list of movie titles (along with explanations) he and the boss kept building; some naughty jokes, some Nazi jokes, and a few titles so crisp and vivid I?m surprised they don?t already exist.

Pure coincidence, of course?various designers, decades apart?but this collection of Milos Forman posters offers all sorts of internal rhymes and echoes, as if Forman?s spin on Godard?s edict had movies needing only a girl, a flag, and maybe a steel helmet. Passed along, like the list above, by MUBI.

Appreciating the work of Dante Ferretti in recreating 1930s Paris and the magic factory of the George Melies film studio for Martin Scorsese in Hugo. At Entertainment Weekly?s Inside Movies, which also has a video and a gallery of stills.

With all the cinema love of film history this year, here?s some real-life Oscar history: Luise Rainer, the oldest living Oscar winner at age 102 and the woman who walked away from MGM after winning back-to-back Best Actress awards. Profiled at Entertainment Weekly.

Video: ?Filmmaking, dead made undead, is happening live at the Centre ? lost or unrealized films by directors as diverse as Jean Vigo,?Kenji Mizoguchi, Lois Weber, William Wellman, von Stroheim (I will appear in that particular?Poto-Poto),?Alexandre Dovjenko and more are coming ? rising from the dead, in their own unique way.??Guy Maddin is raising the dead. From Wednesday, February 22 through Monday, March 12, Maddin is shooting one film a day and Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Centre is streaming the process live at its website. Kim Morgan (movie maven and Maddin?s better half) gives the details at Sunset Gun, where she tries to write between working on the films (?it can be hard to break away ? especially when I?m doing such things like pulling a ribbon of ectoplasm out of Charlotte Rampling?s mouth.?).?The event streams live daily at the website of the Centre Pompidou.

Lina Romay with Jess Franco

Obituary

Barney Rosset, publisher, distributor, and champion of free speech in the arts, passed at as the age of 90. In addition to publishing authors and works that no other publisher would touch?Beckett, Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, DH Lawrence?s ?Lady Chatterly?s Lover,? Henry Miller?s ?Tropic of Cancer??and challenging obscenity laws to defend his right to publish them, his company, Grove, distributed art films and imported I Am Curious (Yellow), once again taking on the government when US Customs seized the film and he challenged obscenity laws in court. David Hudson offers a superb survey of tributes and essays on Rosset and his legacy at Mubi.

Lina Romay, actress and longtime muse to filmmaker Jess Franco (her husband of 40 years), died of cancer last week. News was passed along by Tim Lucas, who pays tribute at his Video Watchblog.

What our contributors are doing

Richard T. Jameson reflects on ?A Year of Nostalgia at the Oscars? at MSN: ?Some of them look back with passion and insight, charming and exciting us with artistry and inventiveness all their own. Some prove to be sounding brass: headlong charges into a distorting mirror. Collectively, they lend an odd cast to this Oscar season??

Also at MSN, Jameson surveys?13 legendary Oscar upsets, while?at Straight Shooting, he offers his picks and predictions for this year?s awards.

Robert Horton keeps up his movie diary and collects links to his new reviews for the Everett Herald at his blog, The Crop Duster and reprints his reviews from the eighties at What a Feeling!

Sean Axmaker?s DVD column Videodrone continues at MSN here. You can find the roundup for and highlights of the February 21 DVD/Blu-ray releases here, including the home video debuts of Rainer Werner Fassbinder?s World on a Wire.

At the Seattle Times,

John Hartl gets into the groove of the Oscar nominated Chico and Rita: ?Remarkably sexy for its genre (it?s not for kids at all), it?s nostalgic about a time and place that rarely gets treated on film (?Godfather II? touched on it), and it has an emotional pull that may catch you by surprise.?

Jeff Shannon looks ahead to Tomorrow When the War Began: ?essentially a World War III thriller for the ?Twilight? crowd, in which our fashionable, ridiculously outnumbered heroes instantly develop amazing survival skills and rise up to fight the enemy.?

Moira Macdonald surveys the options outside of the new film openings.

The Seattle Cinema Scene for the week is at Videodrone here.

The weekly links page is compiled and curated by the editor of and contributors to Parallax View, with the invaluable assistance of Bruce Reid.

Source: http://parallax-view.org/2012/02/24/the-view-beyond-parallax-more-reads-for-week-of-february-24/

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