- I hope those of you who have participated in The Gauntlet are having fun, as I know I am. It's been a good way to find out where your loyalties are. The parings in this first round were completely random, and it's fun to watch people choose between two movies that are completely apples and oranges (though, as Chuck Klosterman points out, apples and oranges aren't actually very different). As the field narrows, upcoming rounds will examine each competing film in more detail, and hopefully you'll all get less polite and resort to childish name-calling - stay tuned!
- Yesterday, Jess and I saw Monster House in digital 3-D at the Crossgates Mall. Although I prefer the IMAX 3-D format (it's sharper and more immersive), the process was still a lot of fun, bringing the titular monster to creaky, spooky life. It's a nifty gimmick, but a gimmick nonetheless; while it's a fun change of pace, ultimately good storytelling is the bottom line on how to get people back into cinemas. Truthfully, I stopped paying attention to the 3-D once the story - Monster House is a fun, surprisingly creepy movie very much in the vein of 80's Amblin productions, and it would have been on my all-time top 10 list when I was eight years old. I'm looking forward to The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D, but I found the trailer's assertion that the film has been stuck in two dimensions sort of smug; I heart Jack Skellington without the aid of special glasses, thank you very much.
- Check out these pictures of Kurt Russell's deadly car from Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. Finally, a reason to look forward to Easter.
- This just became one of my most-anticipated movies: The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, a history of sexual subtext in cinema starring Slavoj Žižek and featuring a score by Brian Eno.
- This week has been encouraging for me. A piece I wrote about Marta Renzi's Porch Stories, my first for a newspaper, is running in the North Adams Transcript tomorrow. And Dennis Cozzalio ran a very kind mention of Cinevistaramascope in his Labor Day Weekend Reading List. I must confess that until recently, I thought this blog was read by about six people, so it's exciting to know that it's making tiny ripples in the world of online film writing (and that I don't completely suck at this). I don't want to overstate its significance; I just wanted to say thanks for reading.
Films watched this week:
The Godfather 10
A Wedding 8
Up in Smoke 7
Monster House 7
The Funhouse 8
The Howling 8
No comments:
Post a Comment