Reading Material

A great piece in Seed Magazine about how weather affects our emotions. I like the bit about the Swiss “foehn” wind.

The largest recorded change caused by a foehn-type wind was in the Black Hills of South Dakota in the winter of 1943 when, in the small town of Spearfish, thermometers rose 49 degrees in only 2 minutes.

A beautiful blend of science and storytelling, it’s my kind of article. Especially since it quotes Joan Didion.

Roderick Heath has a terrific review of Die Hard at the always-awesome Ferdy on Films.

Although Die Hard, like many of its breed, is deliberately funny, what was clearly proven by Len Wiseman’s sanitised, plasticised Live Free or Die Hard in 2007, in which McClane couldn’t even get the whole of his signature catchphrase out lest it get the film a prohibitive censor rating, was that the Hollywood action film has lost its balls. In Die Hard, great gobs of blood spurt out of bodies when they’re shot, huge explosions rip apart bastions of capitalism, salty language drops from many a mouth, and even the most ludicrous action scenes still look and feel somehow, vaguely real. McClane took the exasperated, but brutality-absorbing normality of Indiana Jones and placed it in a squarely contemporary context. The final images of McClane reveal a man caked in blood and sweat, barely able to stand because of the gashes, gouges, and scorch marks all over his body. His suffering to a degree of physical punishment that had rarely been received by a screen hero before, evokes an almost martyrlike cleansing as the necessary catalyst for John’s return to home and hearth.

Three terrific posts from Peel Slowly (although I could cherrypick from anything this guy writes – his site is amazing):

When Not To Edit: The Kissy Work-Around

and two posts about the famous sound effect “Wilhelm Hails a Cab”. Not to be missed:

The real story of Wilhelm

and

The making of Wilhelm Hails a Cab.

Mitchell and I recently had a huge conversation about Robert Altman’s Nashville that went on for a couple of hours. We both love the film. I was very moved to read this piece from Dennis about Gwen Welles, who is so unforgettable in that film, a character that reminded me of American Idol auditions nowadays, where people show up who really feel they are stars, in their own minds, yet they cannot sing, will never be able to sing, and live in an extended state of delusion about what they sound like. Her character is tragic, dancing in front of her own mirror, lost in a dreamspace of fame. And the strip scene is nearly unwatchable. Dennis writes, about Welles in Henry Jaglom’s picture A Safe Place:

Welles was a pretty, natural actress who seemed incapable of a phony impulse—some I think mistook this rawness for lack of talent, and the kind of roles she is best known for (Sueleen Gay in Nashville being the best example) probably reinforce this notion to an uncomfortable degree. But she was smart, quick, and she used that nasal, disaffected voice to disarm those who hoped to catch her “acting” in pictures like Altman’s delightfully baked Southern California dreamscape California Split (1974) or Joan Micklin Silver’s comedy set backstage at an independent weekly newspaper, Between the Lines (1977), or even in Roger Vadim’s period drama Hellé (1972), in which she plays a deaf-mute girl who befriends a French veteran who returns home during the earliest days of the Vietnam War. Welles had a captivating strawberry beauty about her and a slightly stoned fizz endemic to her personality that was sweetly seductive, and you can see in that monologue in A Safe Place that Jaglom had a camera subject, quite different from the one he had in Weld, who could do more to invite the viewer inside than he as a director might have been capable of handling at that point (if ever). Welles relates a situation in which she’s walking down some New York City street and suddenly becomes painfully aware of her vulnerability, and Jaglom surrounds her with actors hanging out, rolling joints, paying half-attention to what she’s saying and being condescending and inappropriately jokey when they do pay attention. After being scolded by a store owner for leaving herself open to attack by unsavory types on the street, Welles relates how she began, on her unaccompanied walk home, to let her paranoia about being attacked take over, eventually imagining herself as a lonely, bruised, ugly 45-year-old whore who can’t be sure if she even cared if she were to be raped or not. She goes on, her companions on the bed still only half listening, to describe becoming enamored of the entire experience of feeling so degraded—“I loved that whole feeling; It was a turn-on, very sexy.”

If you’ve read me for a while, you know my fascination with Polish film posters. Here’s a piece from Edmund Mullins, with some great images. There’s a new book out, apparently, about the post-war Polish film poster, something I am eager to get my hands on. I love the Polish poster showed in that post for Far From the Madding Crowd. I’d like to have that on my wall.

Frame Within the Frame. That scene, in particular, makes me laugh out loud. Poor Ralph Bellamy. What a boob.

A cool post from Nathaniel at Film Experience, a blog I love: Michael Cera’s career in posters.

I love that the latest review on Noir of the Week (a site I have written for from time to time) is a review of William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA.

Part 6 in the amazing Razzle Dazzle series, put together with excruciating care and detail by Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas. An ongoing examination of fame as depicted in motion pictures, this final installation is called The Takeaway. If you haven’t watched the rest of them, you can find links to all of them here. An amazing accomplishment.

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1 Response to Reading Material

  1. Belvoir says:

    Wow- Sheila, thank you so much for turning me on to the “Razzle Dazzle” series. I hadn’t known about it, and after watching two installments I’m so impressed. Fascinating stuff. Thanks again. Yes, it’s quite an achievement to put together.

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