Jandy's Meanderings http://www.the-frame.com/blog the cutting room floor of memory Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:03:54 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Bookmarks for November 2nd through November 6th http://www.the-frame.com/blog/2009/11/06/bookmarks-for-november-2nd-through-november-6th/ http://www.the-frame.com/blog/2009/11/06/bookmarks-for-november-2nd-through-november-6th/#comments Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:03:49 +0000 Jandy http://www.the-frame.com/blog/?p=2941 15 Free Guides That Really Teach You USEFUL Stuff – Top 5 Sites For Free Sound Effects Downloads – Google Wave Guide: User Manual Released for Wave – 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error 15 great Google Chrome extensions – Similar Posts: Rant TV Networks Try to Counter YouTube WOW Firefox Extensions I Couldn’t Live Without Did [...]
  • 15 Free Guides That Really Teach You USEFUL Stuff –
  • Top 5 Sites For Free Sound Effects Downloads –
  • Google Wave Guide: User Manual Released for Wave –
  • 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
  • 15 great Google Chrome extensions –

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    ]]>     http://www.the-frame.com/blog/2009/11/06/bookmarks-for-november-2nd-through-november-6th/feed/ 0     Bookmarks for October 23rd through November 2nd http://www.the-frame.com/blog/2009/11/02/bookmarks-for-october-23rd-through-november-2nd/ http://www.the-frame.com/blog/2009/11/02/bookmarks-for-october-23rd-through-november-2nd/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:00:51 +0000 Jandy http://www.the-frame.com/blog/?p=2886 31 Websites Using Huge Type | scarletbits.com – 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error Classic Cinema Online – Home – 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error Film Studies For Free: Film International for free – Lynch, Kieślowśki, Gomorrah, Brokeback Mountain, Tearoom, and Caché – Similar Posts: Writer’s Guild Strike Videos Silent Movie Theatre [...]
  • 31 Websites Using Huge Type | scarletbits.com –
  • 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
  • Classic Cinema Online – Home –
  • 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
  • Film Studies For Free: Film International for free – Lynch, Kieślowśki, Gomorrah, Brokeback Mountain, Tearoom, and Caché –

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    ]]>     http://www.the-frame.com/blog/2009/11/02/bookmarks-for-october-23rd-through-november-2nd/feed/ 0     Film on TV: November 2-8 http://www.the-frame.com/blog/2009/11/02/film-on-tv-november-2-8/ http://www.the-frame.com/blog/2009/11/02/film-on-tv-november-2-8/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:15:47 +0000 Jandy http://www.the-frame.com/blog/?p=2933 Nearly everything’s a repeat this week, but many of them haven’t been on for months, so check anyway, there may be something worthwhile. And since there aren’t really that many exciting Newly Featured films this week, let me take the opportunity to plug Maria Full of Grace, which is one of those movies that I [...]
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    Nearly everything’s a repeat this week, but many of them haven’t been on for months, so check anyway, there may be something worthwhile. And since there aren’t really that many exciting Newly Featured films this week, let me take the opportunity to plug Maria Full of Grace, which is one of those movies that I recommend to people all the time, whenever I can, as a sort of under the radar film that ought to be far more noticed than it is. It’s playing Sunday the 8th at 4:15pm (on IFC).

    Monday, November 2

    8:05am – IFC – Three Times
    Hsiao-hsien Hou directs this tripartite film – three stories set in three different time periods (1911, 1966, and 2005), each with the same actors, and each depicting a relationship that’s both very specific and individual and also sheds light on the mores of its respective time period. I liked the 1966 story the best, but they were all intriguing, and the contrast between them even more so.
    2005 Hong Kong. Director: Hsiao-hsien Hou. Starring: Qi Shu, Chen Chang.
    (repeats at 2:00pm, and 5:25am on the 3rd)

    12:00N – TCM – Arsenic and Old Lace
    In what is probably Capra’s zaniest, least Capra-corn-esque film, Cary Grant plays Mortimer Brewster – a perfectly normal man until he discovers that his sweet old maid aunts have accumulated several dead bodies in the basement due to poisoning lonely old men. Add in another nephew who is a serial killer, a quack plastic surgeon, and an uncle who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, and Mortimer’s got his hands full trying to keep his family secrets away from the girl he loves. It’s over-the-top, sure, but you gotta love the crazy.
    1944 USA. Director: Frank Capra. Starring: Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Josephine Hull, Jean Adair, Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre.

    8:00pm – TCM – Vertigo
    James Stewart is a detective recovering from a vertigo-inducing fall who’s asked by an old friend to help his wife, who has developed strange behavior. Hitchcock plays with doubling, fate, and obsession, all the while creating one of his moodiest and most mesmerizing films. And watch for a great supporting turn by Barbara Bel Geddes as Stewart’s long-suffering best friend.
    1958 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes.
    Must See

    10:15pm – TCM – North by Northwest
    Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) gets mistaken for George Kaplan and pulled into an elaborate web of espionage in one of Hitchcock’s most enjoyable and funniest thrillers. So many great scenes it’s impossible to list them all.
    1959 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau.
    Must See

    12:45am (3rd) – TCM – Anatomy of a Murder
    One of the best courtroom dramas ever made – James Stewart vs. George C. Scott as lawyers on a murder/rape trial that may not be quite what it seems. And that’s aside from the top-notch jazz score by Duke Ellington, which is in itself reason enough to see the film.
    1959 USA. Director: Otto Preminger. Starring: James Stewart, George C. Scott, Lee Remick.
    Must See

    Tuesday, November 3

    Catch-up Day!

    Wednesday, November 4

    6:15pm – Sundance – Bob le flambeur
    Jean-Pierre Melville’s noirish crime film about an aging gambler/thief who takes on one last job – knocking over a casino. Melville was the master of French crime films, and an important figure leading up to the New Wave – Godard name-checks this film in Breathless, mentioning Bob le flambeur (Bob the Gambler) as an associate of Michel’s.
    1956 France. Director: Jean-Pierre Melville. Starring: Roger Duchesne, Isabelle Corey, Gérard Buhr, Daniel Gauchy.
    (repeats at 9:10am and 3:45pm on the 5th)

    8:00pm – IFC – Hero
    Jet Li is the titular hero in this Zhang Yimou film, arguably the best of Yimou’s period action-on-wires films (though I’m partial to House of Flying Daggers myself). The story unfolds in flashback as Li explains to a warlord how he eliminated three would-be assassins (who happen to be three of Hong Kong cinema’s biggest stars, incidentally) – but all may not be precisely how it seems.
    2002 China. Director: Zhang Yimou. Starring: Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung.
    Newly featured!

    (repeats at 2:00am on the 5th)

    12:45am – Sundance – Black Book
    Paul Verhoeven invests Black Book with just enough of his signature over-the-top brashness to give the WWII story of a Dutch Jewish woman infiltrating the Gestapo for the Resistance a healthy dose of panache. Every time you think it won’t go the next step, it does, and it’s ravishingly entertaining the whole time.
    2006 Netherlands. Director: Paul Verhoeven. Starring: Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman.

    2:00am (5th) – TCM – Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
    What do you do when you’re seven brothers in the backwoods and need wives? Why, go kidnap them of course! Patriarchal values aside, Seven Brides is one of the most entertaining movie musicals ever made, and I defy anyone to outdo the barn dance/raising scene.
    1954 USA. Director: Stanley Donen. Starring: Howard Keel, Jane Powell, Russ Tamblyn.

    Thursday, November 5

    10:00pm – TCM – High Noon
    An Oscar-winning performance by Gary Cooper and an early role for Grace Kelly in Fred Zinnemann’s classic cowboy showdown drama. Follow it up with Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, something of a response to High Noon, which Hawks disliked.
    1952 USA. Director: Fred Zinnemann. Starring: Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Katy Jurado.

    Friday, November 6

    5:00am – TCM – Roman Holiday
    Audrey Hepburn’s first lead role, and the one that immediately catapulted her into stardom. She’s a princess who runs away to try out being normal, and spends an adventurous day exploring Rome with incognito journalist Gregory Peck. Pretty much delightful right the way through.
    1953 USA. Director: William Wyler. Starring: Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert.

    9:15am – IFC – Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
    Lawrence Sterne’s 1769 proto-postmodern novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy has long been considered unfilmable. So what does director Michael Winterbottom do? He makes a film about the difficulty of filming Tristram Shandy. Winterbottom’s film is something of an experiment, but it’s a delightful one, showing the behind-the-scenes antics of production as well as highlighting the circularity and self-defeating narrative of Sterne’s novel in the film-within-the-film.
    2005 UK. Director: Michael Winterbottom. Starring: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Keeley Hawes, Shirley Henderson, Jeremy Northam.
    (repeats at 3:00pm)

    11:45am – Sundance – Le doulos
    Jean-Paul Belmondo brings his signature style to Jean-Pierre Meville’s excellent crime film as a possible police informant working with another criminal on a jewel heist. These two men are played off each other in a sort of doubling motif – it’s often even difficult to tell which is which, due to careful cinematography and lighting work by Melville.
    1962 France. Director: Jean-Pierre Melville. Starring: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Serge Reggiani, René Lefèvre.
    (repeats at 5:00pm)

    4:00pm – TCM – Tarzan, the Ape Man
    Get your pre-code action right here, as swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller brings Tarzan to life and Maureen O’Sullivan teaches him the ways of the human world as Jane. Generally, the sequel Tarzan and His Mate is considered the best of the series, but hey. Gotta start somewhere.
    1932 USA. Director: W.S. Van Dyke. Starring: Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O’Sullivan.

    6:15pm – IFC – Pulp Fiction
    Tarantino’s enormously influential and entertaining film pretty much needs no introduction from me. Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta give the performances of their careers, Tarantino’s dialogue is spot-on in its pop-culture-infused wit, and the chronology-shifting, story-hopping editing style has inspired a host of imitators, most nowhere near as good.
    1994 USA. Director: Quentin Tarantino. Starring: Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, John Travolta, Tim Roth, Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames.
    Must See
    Newly Featured!

    Saturday, November 7

    12:30pm – Sundance – Volver
    Pedro Almodóvar deftly straddles the line between drama and comedy in one of his more accessible films. Two sisters return to their home at the death of their aunt, only to find their mother’s ghost – or is it a ghost? And as always in Almodóvar’s films, there are related subplots aplenty. Penélope Cruz is incredible as the younger, fierier sister – she’s never been more moving than in her passionate rendition of the title song, nor funnier than when calmly cleaning up a murder scene.
    2006 Spain. Director: Pedro Almodóvar. Starring: Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, Blanco Portillo, Yohana Cobo
    Must See

    8:00pm – TCM – Take the Money and Run
    An early Woody Allen movie, when he was mostly focused on being funny and absurd, and this film about a set of totally inept bank robbers is both. It’s actually my favorite of the pre-Annie Hall Allen films.
    1969 USA. Director: Woody Allen. Starring: Woody Allen, Janet Margolin.

    Sunday, November 8

    12:00N – TCM – The Maltese Falcon
    Humphrey Bogart inhabits the role of Dashiell Hammett’s private eye Sam Spade, creating one of the definitive on-screen hard-boiled detective (vying only with Bogart’s Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, really). Not mention setting the early benchmark for noir films.
    1941 USA. Director: John Huston. Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Elisha Cook Jr, Walter Huston.
    Must See

    4:15pm – IFC – Maria Full of Grace
    Once in a while a film comes out of nowhere and floors me – this quiet little film about a group of South American women who agree to smuggle drugs into the United States by swallowing packets of cocaine did just that. Everything in the film is perfectly balanced, no element overwhelms anything else, and it all comes together with great empathy, but without sentimentality.
    2004 USA. Director: Joshua Marston. Starring: Catalina Sandino Moreno, Virginia Ariza, Yenny Paola Vega.

    8:15pm – IFC – The Proposition
    Australia’s answer to the western; Guy Pearce must hunt down and capture his brothers for the law in order to save his own skin. Gritty and violent almost to a fault, and it definitely brought new life to the Western genre.
    2005 Australia. Director: John Hillcoat. Starring: Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone.
    (repeats at 1:00am on the 9th)

    10:00pm – IFC – A Woman Under the Influence
    Gena Rowlands gives a tour-de-force performance as Mabel, a woman whose teetering madness threatens her marriage to Nick (Peter Falk). Their relationship edges back and forth between love, frustration, and anger with amazing quickness, yet it’s not clear whether Mabel’s instability is causing the problems, or the other way around. John Cassavetes directs with an unwavering camera, refusing to look away.
    1974 USA. Director: John Cassavetes. Starring: Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Fred Draper, Lady Rowlands.
    (repeats at 5:30am on the 9th)

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    ]]>     http://www.the-frame.com/blog/2009/11/02/film-on-tv-november-2-8/feed/ 0 mariamovie.jpg     Featured Video: The Tell-Tale Heart (1953) http://www.the-frame.com/blog/2009/10/31/featured-video-the-tell-tale-heart-1953/ http://www.the-frame.com/blog/2009/10/31/featured-video-the-tell-tale-heart-1953/#comments Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:03:41 +0000 Jandy http://www.the-frame.com/blog/?p=2924 One of the most intense and memorable cartoons of all time, adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”. UPA studios produced this gem in 1953, utilizing an extremely abstract and completely unique style. There’s very little actual movement in the film, which, like the original story, centers on a man who kills [...]

    One of the most intense and memorable cartoons of all time, adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”. UPA studios produced this gem in 1953, utilizing an extremely abstract and completely unique style. There’s very little actual movement in the film, which, like the original story, centers on a man who kills his landlord mostly for the heck of it (or, he says, because the old man’s eye wouldn’t stop staring at him) and then believes he hears the dead man’s heart beating. Instead, a sense of urgency and madness is conveyed almost solely through editing, chaotic stills, and James Mason’s frantic voiceover. I’ve heard that this was the first animated short to ever be declared “for adults only” by the British ratings board, and while I’m not sure there’s much here that’s completely inappropriate for kids, it’s certainly true that this is not a cartoon to be dismissed as kids stuff. It isn’t.

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    ]]>     http://www.the-frame.com/blog/2009/10/31/featured-video-the-tell-tale-heart-1953/feed/ 0     Featured Video: The Old Man and the Goblins (1998) http://www.the-frame.com/blog/2009/10/30/featured-video-the-old-man-and-the-goblins-1998/ http://www.the-frame.com/blog/2009/10/30/featured-video-the-old-man-and-the-goblins-1998/#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:02:40 +0000 Jandy http://www.the-frame.com/blog/?p=2922 From the very old yesterday to the pretty new today – but stop-motion film The Old Man and the Goblins has a very vintage look to it while remaining fresh and innovative. The title is basically the story: A weird old man is kidnapped by goblins and taken down into their lair. The cool thing [...]

    From the very old yesterday to the pretty new today – but stop-motion film The Old Man and the Goblins has a very vintage look to it while remaining fresh and innovative. The title is basically the story: A weird old man is kidnapped by goblins and taken down into their lair. The cool thing is the visuals, many of which are absolutely stunning. From Screen Novelties, who also did a really entertaining stop-motion/puppet animation called Graveyard Jamboree with Mysterious Mose. And probably other stuff I don’t know about yet.

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