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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Odds and Ends

Hey, ho, happy day after Memorial Day weekend! Who didn’t
want to go back to work/school today? Yeah, me either.

Here’s something I think you’ll enjoy if you haven’t checked it out already: Matt Zoller Seitz’s very excellent video essay series on the films of Terrence Malick. Seitz’s commentary is smart and insightful; his knowledge of Malick’s body of work is quite academic, but conveyed in a way that makes his thoughts easy to digest. Part One of the series, on Malick’s first film, Badlands (1973) , is above.

Further video essays explore Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005).

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I was enoying reading Andrew O’Hehir’s excellent Salon piece on recent films about ’70s radical terrorism today. Go read it, it’s good stuff. One of my favorite movie-related articles this year. Here’s a nibble:

Uli Edel and Bernd Eichinger’s Oscar-nominated “Baader Meinhof Complex” set West Germany’s legendary student radicals against the vivid social context of a repressive American client state still suffering from Nazi hangover, where fervid Trotskyist rhetoric seemed to spread like herpes (and often via the same vectors).

I love the mental picture that sentence evokes.

And lastly, YouTube suggested I might like this guy, based on the fact that I watched the Yatta Yatta video a while back.

Guy’s got a lot of videos, and he’s pretty funny. I kinda like him.

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“Just got back from Dark Shadows at the Lincoln Square IMAX (102′ wide screen, over 50 sears per row). I loved almost every second of it. What a shock. I can see why people under 49 hate it, and it’s not just because of its ’60s TV roots–it’s a very traditional, classic-style horror film: leisurely-paced, character-driven, beautifully designed (mostly real sets, not CGI), music used as a humorous or ironic underline, not particularly violent (there’s more blood in the 1970 version), perfectly cast with superb actors, and of course a nice sense of humor to balance the horror. No jump scenes, no teens sliced to pieces by some mask-wearing non-entity, just good old-fashioned story-telling. It’s more like Hugo than Hostel, and not just because it shares cast members and underperformed. And as for the much-derided third act: the complaints are horseshit. Everything that takes place in the climax is logically built up to in what precedes it. Yes, the werewolf is a surprise, but it shouldn’t be given the family history and that character’s behavior, and the explanation is eminently reasonable. In an era where Bridesmaids is considered award-worthy writing, it’s no surprise that many people have forgotten what a well-made script can be like. So fuck all the haters. Dark Shadows lived up to my expectations (no small feat), and should be seen by everyone who still appreciates quality, grown-up, Old Hollywood-style filmmaking. Cadavra has spoken.”
~ Cadavra on Dark Shadows

‘This grooming and styling thing? It’s fucking poodles. Human poodles. I feel sorry for a poodle because he’s a dog. You know, a dog is a fucking great creature. They would do anything for you. And the poodle gets a haircut. No one asks if the poodle wants his hair cut like that. Do they? They just fucking cut his hair like that. And he just walks around. And everyone is like, “Why is that poodle so snarky?” Fuck you. Style, I think, is panache. Who are you? What did you do today? And what are you worth to me? What do you have to offer the world? How did you spend your time today on this planet? How are you spending your time every second? What are you doing now? Are you alive, or are you somnambulant? If you are somnambulant, then you are a fucking prick. Style is your ability to be awake. But who the fuck am I to judge? I’m starting to get really arrogant.”
GQ: Whose tuxedo did you wear on the red carpet here in Cannes?
“J.Lindeberg. Because I really love his suits.”
~ Stylin’ Tom Hardy

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