Film & TV: September 2005 Archives

The New York Times has a short article on the guy who created the romantic comedy remix of "The Shining." He's already getting calls from Hollywood studios.

Looks like the awards show voting season is underway in the US, too--the IMDB reports that the first Oscar screeners have just gone out.

Two pieces of awards-show-season e-mail arrived in my inbox today, signifying that the season has begun in earnest:

1. Cinea wants to remind me to register the DVD player they sent me last award season. It's been sitting unregistered in a shelf since then, and I don't intend to register it this year, either. For those of you unfamiliar with the technology, a Cinea DVD player allows studios to send out screener DVDs that can only be played on the Cinea DVD player--and only on the Cinea DVD player of a single person, at that. I'm afraid that, if I register my player, I'll be contributing to Cinea's installed user base, which will encourage studios to send out Cinea-only DVDs, and I resent having to wedge a second DVD player into my already-crowded TV cabinet. Still, if there's some Cinea-only film that I feel I really have to watch in order to vote this year, I will bite the bullet and register the damn thing.

2. BVI wants me to know that next week, they'll be having screenings of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Cinderella Man, Sin City, and Goal! next week.

I'm not surprised that Cinderella Manand Sin City are getting pushed for awards, and it makes sense to push Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, given how fond the British are of the original series. I'm interested that the list includesGoal!--a film that looked to be fairly bog-standard, based on the reviews I've seen.

I went over to the Raindance Film Festival hoping to use my hard-won festival pass to get into NightWatch, which is supposed to be an exuberently over-the-top Russian fantasy thriller. Alas, it was sold out, perhaps because it's been labeled the must-see film of the year by Quentin Tarantino. (By which I mean that Quentin Tarantino has decreed it a must-see film, not that it is a film that must be seen by Quentin Tarantino.)

Instead, I watched the best films of Straight8, an annual filmmaking competition in which filmmakers are given a blank cartridge of Super8 film and challenged to shoot a short movie with it. The catch is that you have to hand in your film cartridge undeveloped, which means (1) you can't do any post-production on your film, and any edits have to be done "in-camera" by turning the camera off, pointing it at the next shot, and turning it back on; and (2) you don't get to see your finished film until it's projected onscreen at to a full theater.

In its adrenaline-fueled let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may spirit, the event reminds me of the 48 Hour Film Challenge, although in other respects it's completely opposite. The 48 Hour Film Challenge requires your film to be more-or-less improvised on the spot, but the Straight8 festival, by demanding that you edit your entire film on camera, requires a great deal of advance planning.

In any case, the results were interesting. Some were only successful in context. Others-- in particular, a quirky short about a guy who grows colour televisions in his garden-- would be charming and funny even if you didn't know the restrictions under which they were made.

I hadn't heard of the event before today, but now I'm highly tempted to enter it next time around.

I'm really looking forward to seeing this new, heart-warming Jack Nicholson film. (Link goes directly to a quicktime file.)

There's a great Yiddish word--

Actually, let me start again.

There are a million great Yiddish words, and among them is "zitsfleisch." It literal means "sitting flesh," and it describes the ability to sit patiently for long periods of time.

It's an essential quality for a truly obsessive movie lover. I think I've got pretty good zitsfleisch. I can happily watch three movies in a day, and I've watched seven movies in a single 48-hour-period on more than one occasion.

But I must tip my cap to Noel Murray, a film critic for The Onion, who recently watched seven movies in one day, and was able to say something coherent about each of them. Now that's zitsfleisch.

Having reached his 50s, Jackie Chan is starting to talk about abandoning stunts and fight scenes. This is certainly reasonable enough; most twenty-year-olds couldn't put their bodies through the kinds of punishment he regularly undergoes in making movies, even if he has become more willing to use wires and special effects as time has gone by.

Still, I'm saddened by the news. Drunken Master II (which was released in the US as "Legend of the Drunken Master") is one of my all-time favorite movies. Drunken Master II's script is nowhere near as brilliant as the one Comden and Green wrote for Singin' In The Rain, of course, but the two movies stand together in my mind as the great cinematic expressions of the sheer joy of movement. And Shanghai Knights showed that Jackie can still deliver breathtaking fight scenes when given a director who appreciates his skills, and a script that plays to his strengths.

I realize he's not retiring from film altogether; he's just looking for roles that won't require him to run down the side of a skyscraper, or spend two weeks filming a fight scene. Still, it's the end of an era.

The days are getting shorter, and the air chillier. That can only mean one thing: awards show season is on its way.

True, voting for the BAFTAs, the Oscars, the WGA awards, and all the others are still months away--but I've already started receiving a trickle of e-mail invitations to special film screenings for BAFTA members. Movie addict that I am, when I see these first few invitations flutter into my inbox, my heart leaps as joyously as if they were the first changed leaves of autumn.

Last year, I wrote a giant single post about the movie-filled madness that is awards season. This year, I'm going to try to write about things as they happen, to give you more of a sense of the steady onslaught of screenings that fight for an awards-show voter's attention.

As always, I want to emphasize that I don't speak for BAFTA, or anybody else other than myself...