Top teats. Whoops, tweets.

by Claire Twisselman

[Ed's note: Though part of her charm on twitter (already!) is her lack of punctuation and/or grammar rules, I asked Claire to clean up those lists she came up with for our little blog party here.]

I gave in, I joined twitter. And what does Knight do? Asks me to then go back and blog about it? What a goofus. In any event, here's the lists I came up with for the year and for the decade. I'm not going to go back and change them, though, to add Antichrist, like I remembered just a minute ago, but, whatever, you know? These were the movies that taught me some things this year, this decade. I still don't know much! Also, I haven't seen everything, so some things might get pushed around when I see, oh I don't know, Police, Adj. So let me know what you think! Am I cool enough to play in this boys club from time to time? In any event, happy new year. Can't wait to grow up some more in this new decade.


2009

1. Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino — Yes, I'm a Jew.
2. Summer Hours, Olivier Assayas — Remember, readers, vinyl is heavy. And don't listen to anybody who tells you this isn't lovely, and smart; it's subtle in ways, say, Arnaud Desplechin never could be.
3. Julia, Eric Zonca — Tilda Swinton is my hero.
4. The Headless Woman, Lucretia Martel — Except for the Coens' movie and Wes Anderson's fox, nothing else is this dedicated. Demanding but rewarding. And terrifying.
5. Two Lovers, James Gray — Joaquin Phoenix is too, too good at being so, so bad at life.
6. The Girlfriend Experience + The Informant!, Steven Soderbergh — What Karina Longworth said. Something about the economy.
7. In the Loop, Armando Iannucci — Lubricated horse cock indeed! Sure, Malcolm's a horse (the movie rides on him, his shoulders), but Gandolfini kills it. I've watched it about five times.
8. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans, Werner Herzog — How come nobody talks about how bad an actress, and how boring a sex symbol, Eva Mendes is? Why does she get a pass? Oh, right, Nic Cage. Derr.
9. A Serious Man, Coens + Fantastic Mr Fox, Wes Anderson — Two polar opposite readings of Nietzsche: one's neutered, the other's fertile. This is what I'd propose for that fantasy double bill thing they've got at The Notebook.
10. Duplicity, Tony Gilroy — There needs to be more banter in movies, and more split screens. Their confessions of their mutual love was shockingly moving for this lil lady.
11. The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke — Dreadful, from frame one on. Yes: full of dread.
12. Broken Embraces, Pedro Almodovar — Penelope Cruz is the sexiest, duh, and Pedro seems to know almost everything about making movies. Great movie for tit lovers.
13. 35 Rhums, Claire Denis — "Marvin... you were this friend of mine..."
14. Drag Me To Hell, Sam Raimi — C'mon, man, go back to "real movies" more often!
15. Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola — All of it's in that scene with the cigarette.

The Decade

1. There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson, '07 — I see the worst in people.
2. Dogville, Lars Von Trier, '03 — Big time. Really taught me some things: about myself, about being a lady, about James Caan. Caan! He's, big surprise, the secret.
3. Esther Kahn, Arnaud Desplechin, '00 — Don't get Ry started! Don't get me started either! Any woman who wants to brush her face after her teeth is a-ok with me.
4. In The Cut, Jane Campion, '03 — Sexy and scary and everything I hate/love about NYC (and being a lady in NYC).
5. Yi Yi, Edward Yang, '00 — Fucks me up. In a delicate way. Like getting a soul massage, kinda.
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry, '04 — Fucks me up.
7. The World, Jia Zhang-ke, '04 — Everybody keeps saying Platform is Jia's movie of the decade, but this one is better, or more important, and digital, and it's got a way less happy ending.
8. Kill Bill + Death Proof + Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino, '03/'04 + '07 + '09 — The best movie movie movie run of the decade, but, hmn, who cares, huh?
9. Regular Lovers, Philippe Garrel, '05 — Black and white and red all over. This dude sure does make seem suicide seem painful (eep, not painless).
10. Flight of the Red Balloon, Hou Hsiao-hsien, '07 — If this is what being a mom is like, I could maybe be game. Except for all that deadbeat dad shit, this is what life should look like, I think.
11. The New World, Terrence Malick, '05 — Amazing, no doubt, but it's not anything that's not in The Thin Red Line.
12. Femme Fatale, Brian De Palma, '02 — I kinda dig how sleezy this flick is since, like a lot of this guy's movies, it's big hot air balloon full of prurience. And he's got some idea about movies being a dirty act he's always pushing. But here it's also about Paris and France. Also, De Palma gets Banderas.
13. Mulholland Dr., David Lynch, '01 — Taught me to see with my ears. Why are so many critics picking this one over INLAND EMPIRE? Because this one has lesbians! Nude! Imagine that!
14. The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson, '07 — I know Ry's got a hard on for The Life Aquatic, but this one hurts more, is tighter.
15. Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt, '08 — Best dog movie I've seen and a great train idea or 8, too.
16. The Man Who Wasn't There, Coens, '01 — Obviously their best movie. It's got some hope.

Two Jacks. Or, No way, Jose!

by Claire Twisselman

Call me a grinchess: I don't care! Most of the people I love the most live for Halloween. I don't. Straight up. In fact, it's pretty basic: I hate it. Sure, I've had some fun times. But, seriously, as I've gotten older, rampant costuming and no-mystery ghoulish behavior makes me make a "that smells" face. And part of my scowl comes from everybody being an asshole, insisting on my participation. I don't dress up. Stop poking my ribs, jerks! Do you want me to wear nothing? To get drunk and make out with my best friend? No thanks. And I've worn fishnets. Hell, I've even made out with my best friend. But, you know what? The best thing about Halloween is the pumpkins—and the start of pumpkin pie season. So that's what I've done this year, and that's what I'll do tonight: make faces with a knife. Also, I'll watch The Shining on my uncle's ginormous television in his basement with the sound turned up way loud. Yup: I'll be avoiding the doorbell.

[Later I might whip my own cream for a slice of my aunt's perfect vegan pie. Click that image above for a similar recipe I found, looking for a picture since I left my camera in my friend's back seat last weekend.]

Two thousand weight? #6: Quick Wendy and Lucy plug.

by Claire Twisselman

I think I want to call it the American film of the year. I think it's for me the way There Will Be Blood was for me last year. Like: how come more people won't see this thing? It's only 80 minutes long! It won't eat up your day like Che. Check here to see when it comes near you. And then see it, of course. People tell me to kick myself that I didn't see Ballast, but I don't think that one will kick me the way this one kicks me. It's a good thing. Heck, it's a great thing. We need to look at the margins more.

A very plain, very basic view: FUCK Halloween.

by Claire Twisselman

Reaction No. 1:


Reaction No. 2:

A storm of Bastille Day links. An Index. UPDATED.

Here I'll collect links to our own Bastille Day posts and any others our blogging buddies may offer. Just leave me a note in the comments or in an email and I'll be sure to update the list. I will also throw in some links to some pieces about France and French films that I feel should be read around this time of year. But that's for later. For now, here's what we can give you:

• My image essay about a favorite moment in J'ai Pas Sommeil.
  
• Jennifer Stewart on Contempt.
  
• Claire Twisselman on Pierrot le fou and her accompanying, murderous image-essay.
  
• Mark Haslam on France as a place of film. With thoughts on Kieslowski's Bleu.
  
• An omnibus image essay from all our posts today.
  
• I missed Playtime in 70mm, regretfully, but Max Goldberg did not. Dig the 4th graf.
  
• Over at Six Martinis and the Seventh Art, shahn (who I had the pleasure of meeting this weekend at the SF Silent Film Fest) offers a delightful little post titled, quite simply, bastille day 2008, with stills from James White's Paris Exhibition Films 1900.
  
• David Hudson gives us a nod as well as pointing to other cool links about The French.
  
• Glenn Kenny's newest post is three scenes from three decades, each about l'auteur in relation to l'autre l'auteur formidable, Jean-Luc Godard. Earlier this month he brought up anti-Semitism and Godard and that Brody book. He also reviewed the new Criterion disc of Tati's Trafic at The Auteurs' Notbook.
  
• That Brody book: Everything is Cinema. And that silly Stephanie Zacharek review which has a few people riled. Like Craig Keller. David Phelps has the most interesting reaction I've read.
  
• Speaking of David Phelps, he's a big Rivette fan. --On Out 1. --On Celine et Julie.
  
• Jacques-Rivette.com
  
• Girish's recent Andre Bazin post.
  
• Tom Sutpen's Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes series.
  
• From the ROUGE archives: Dominique Païni's According to JLG...; Nicole Brenez's À propos de Nice and the Extremely Necessary, Permanent Invention of the Cinematic Pamphlet; Fergus Daly's Maurice Pialat: A Cinema of Surrender; Serge Daney on Philippe Garrel's L’Enfant secret; Luc Moullet's The Green Garbage Bins of Gilles Deleuze.
  
• French Touch sexyman Sebastien Tellier will hit North America at the end of the month. Discobelle has a new Boys Noize remix and the dates.
  

Thanks for reading! We hope you enjoy our odd enthusiasms and we look for yours as well. Now we plan to go eat some cheese and drink some wine, maybe even down some moules frites or, um, a ratatouille. If you didn't get around to posting anything today, on the fourteenth proper, don't worry: I'll continue to update this list as things pop up online, here and elsewhere. --RWK

Fireworks. Pierrot le fou.

by Claire Twisselman

[Part of VINYL IS HEAVY's Bastille Day celebration. Click here to see our index. Click here to view all the entries at once. Click here to see Claire's accompanying image essay.]

Seeing Pierrot le fou in a big, dark theatre was a turning point for me with movies. I don't think my story is particularly out of the ordinary (see here). Godard is an often-traveled road into more serious film interest. His films are fun, playful, smart, rigorous, sometimes boring, hip, sexy, gorgeous and contradictory candy. And I eat it up. I've read -- and heard others say -- that Godard is a young person's filmmaker; that he's more important to young people than older people. I don't know if this is true, but I do know that his exuberance in the 1960s (like most young people, I haven't yet seen much past Week End) is pretty infectious. His movies are giddy for movies. I've since grown to like Masculin-Feminin more than Pierrot, but Pierrot will always remain dear for kick starting my fascination with a lot of French cinema. Or, at least, what the Criterion Collection has made available.

Originally, I told Master Knight that I wanted to write this when Pierrot was released by Criterion. But, as can be the case, I put school first, hanging out with friends second, reading the internet third and writing about movies for the internet a quite distant fourth. (Something I hope to "correct" in the coming year.) Part of my interest has been that the Criterion Collection has played a big part in my burgeoning cinephilia -- along with the ever-expanding blogosphere, Netflix, certain friends' eager recommendations and the rep scene I'm starting to pay attention to. The other reason I wanted to write about Pierrot is because the first time I saw it was in Berkeley, at the Pacific Film Archive, while visiting a friend who insisted we go (1) because the film was rare and is hilarious and (2) because film historian David Thomson introduced the film. Ryland has since told me that he was at the same screening.

All I knew going in was it was going to be a cool French New Wave film with jump cuts and widescreen images and a doomed love story. That's what my friend told me at least. What I didn't expect was how funny the film is. There's a lot of sight gags but my favorite may be up front when Jean-Paul Belmondo's Ferdinand, so mad at the banal "party" his wife has dragged him to, winds up throwing cake at her.

That is, until the final moment with cartoon dynamite and Ferdinand's last second realization that he doesn't want to go up in smoke. Of course, he's too late. If love affairs are all about timing, and this film is certainly about love (that is, an idea or myth of love), then Ferdinand is at once a brilliant, terrible, hopeless and athletic romantic-comic. Or maybe that's just Jean-Paul Belmondo. Who, of course, is Godard's stand-in (his ideal or mythic alter ego), who Godard kills with tongue planted firmly in (blue painted) cheek.




It's certainly easy to think of this movie as Godard killing his already-ended marriage to Anna Karina. It's no doubt a turning point for the director, an awakening to new dimensions of cinema's duty to its audience: which is to say to the world. But, of course, part of what makes Godard interesting is how unsubtle his films shift. Things abut, they don't bleed. He's no Eisenstein but his movies rely on juxtapositions so that it's easy to ignore the in-camera mise-en-scene. Think of the central relationship of Pierrot, a cute flake and her hapless devotee. They're doomed from the beginning. They are their own fireworks. Everywhere they go they leave wreckage. They are ill at ease. In one light, they are Godard's cinema, his bi-polar desires for politically and philosophically aware films over against a B-movie impulse for guns and cars and pure sensation. In another light, the couple is simply an argument about what love does to people, how its impulses sway and push and pull and distort and blow up the world.

But they, that perfectly not perfect couple, brim with possibilities. And that's the appeal of the cinema, too. Furthermore: like Godard's cinema, they take and take and take: they steal their way south. Everything they do is commented on as from some place else, be it a movie or a country or a book or a song. Pierrot le fou is a great argument for recycling! How vomiting up your psyche can be sexy! How theft can turn into production! How (not) to fall in love. And how to look good doing it (or not doing it). The bottom line: keep moving. My favorite Godard movies are the ones that insist on pushing forwards. Although kind of brilliant, La Chinoise is like a stuck-in-a-rutt headache, its Leaud analog, Masculin-Feminin, runs all over the place, even if it spends a lot of time indoors. Also fitting that after his Technicolor adventure here with Pierrot he went back to cheap black and white (with Willy Kurant instead of Raoul Coutard lensing) for a more "documentary" approach. In a lot of ways it seems Pierrot le fou, and not Week End, is the real turning point for Godard's career. The last ditch effort to purge the romance from his system before he could concentrate on more rigorously formal, um, "exercises" -- not fun like the old days, the received wisdom tells me. But I seem to miss or refuse to hear those things. I'm certain that as I continue to look beyond the Criterion Collection and the distinctly New Wave period films I'll find yet more rich material from Godard. Except, I'll have to forge ahead knowing he left a lot of that goofy giveaway pop sensibility behind when he traded in Karina for Wiazemsky. In any event, there's bound to be fireworks in my future, just a different style.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Bastille Day on VINYL.

by Ryland Walker Knight

No, we're not making a record. At least not a real, live long player. Rather, we're gonna write some essays. Or, simply, assemble some blog posts. My buddy Claire over there may get a little murderous again by looking at Anna Karina in Pierrot le fou. You may remember Jennifer Stewart's contribution to our email chain with Kevin Lee (we talked about desire and the gaze and all that); well, Jen's writing something about Contempt, which is about desire and the gaze (among other things) by her lights. Being a big fan of Claire Denis, I may write about how un-patriotic her movies are; how crucial Agnès Godard is to Denis' success; how her troupe of actors builds an interesting demi-monde of characters across the films she's made; how desire and the gaze may work in her pictures; how cool it is that she's, well, a female director -- and how that bolsters her significance in the Franco-film world specifically and the world of film generally. Or I may write something about Playtime, since I'll be seeing that in 70mm on July 8th or 9th. I'm hoping some of the rest of the gang can contribute but it's summer time and I can't get mad at anybody for enjoying the sunshine instead of the glare of a monitor. And, if any of our beloved, if mostly silent, readers want to offer any Francophilic thoughts on July 14th, let me know, either via links in the comments or via emails. Until then, go see Wall-E on a big screen when you aren't out and about, eating cheese or throwing cake or dancing in the woods or driving into the Mediterranean.

Call Me Murderous, Too #1: Melanie Daniels

by Claire Twisselman

[For the rest of the image essay click here.]

Cloverfield targets the yuppies it loves.

by Claire Twisselman

It's kind of great that something like Cloverfield is a hit. Audacity is a strong card to play for me, I guess, and this new kind of monster movie J. J. Abrams delivered is pretty fucking audacious. If only it were a little better. How it could be any better I don't really know. Of course, the screenplay could use some work (re-jigger the trite love story, the inane running commentary, and the almost-idiot plot), and they could have cast some better actors (although it would be hard to find more attractive leads; notice the wise choice to keep Hud off-camera for most of the movie), but this is what we got. This 80-minute digicam movie about holding onto love even when there's a big ugly monster killing the city that the pretty little people populate. No, this isn't The Host or Jaws -- nor is it There Will Be Blood (looking at you, Ryland) -- but, really, what is? Is this movie truly worth hating? I don't think so. It's too weird. Sitting in a packed audience over the weekend, I couldn't believe this thing was actually making a lot of money: its handycam shake borders on unwatchable, the totally fuckable cast (thanks, Nathan Lee) is serviceable at its best, and I could totally see why it might give people a headache. That is if I wasn't so interested and involved in the movie the whole time I was watching it unfold.

The beginning is precious enough, and kind of longish, since there's only 80 minutes of movie, but both Michael Stahl-David (as the ostensible hero, Rob) and Odette Yustman (as the damsel-in-distress, Beth) are so good looking that I didn't quite care. The next part, with Rob's brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and his girlfriend, Lily (Jessica Lucas), starts out obnoxious since Jason can't work the camera, and it doesn't get much better once he hands off documentary duties to Hud (T. J. Miller), until the monster shit (like the head of The Statue of Liberty) hits the fan and starts flying down the streets. Then these yuppies start getting what they deserve. I mean, right? Get over yourselves! I hope to live in one of those kinds of amazing downtown loft-type apartments -- I'd love it, yes -- but I hope even more to never get that hung up on bullshit "love affairs" interfering with my professional life. You just deal with shit. I guess that's part of the point the movie is trying to make but with so much time and affection devoted to this young non-couple's not-quite-unrequited love (I'm talking Rob and Beth) it's hard to ignore that Cloverfield is definitely targeted at yuppies the same way it's out to kill yuppies. Like most aspects of the movie, it's a mixed bag.

The coolest thing about Cloverfield is probably that, despite itself, I sat not apoplectic and bewildered but jazzed up and ready since I was so caught up with the idea that a monster movie was made like this. Okay, The Blair Witch Project did it first, I guess, and I like that it was a hit, but this one is a real big time movie, with one of those genius hype-generating marketing campaigns. (Okay, its marketing was kind of a rip off of the Blair Witch internet craze, too.) But, anyways, Cloverfield made a ton of money this weekend and it's a weird, not-typical Hollywood movie. Even The Bourne Ultimatum isn't this wobbly. I don't really know anything about avant-garde cinema but that late auto-focus fidgeting in the grass may be one of the coolest/weirdest things in a blockbuster I've seen in a while. Starting here of all places I can start to see why Cloverfield is different than Blair Witch: the camera is just another witness here, instead of some kind of agency device. It's also the reason it's a pretty muddled movie. For all the silly humanism in the stupid love story, the filmmaking itself isn't really interested in humans. It's a document --some weird artifact the government found? -- of human kind's idiot notion that they should win any and every battle because they can love. But love doesn't save anybody here. In fact, it's just the opposite. Jason says it best in the first clause of his rule, "Forget the rest of the world," before he fucks up and seals his fate with, "and hold on to the ones you love the most." Of course he'll die first! (Maybe that's why killing all those yuppies works: Tom Cruise slummed it as a blue collar, deadbeat dad to survive Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Privilege breeds contempt? Perhaps. I mean, I sure did hate that Tom's wife's parents (and all of Boston, for the most part) were relatively unscathed.) Still: It's not worth hating, and it's worth looking at, even if it's a little (a lot?) stupid.

Like I said above, it's not the screenplay that got me hot (if it did, indeed, get me bothered): it was how Abrams and director Matt Reeves used the digicam to capture the mayhem. It should be no surprise that the best sequence of the movie is the one you get a glimpse of in the trailer: the one where the Army rolls through shooting the monster with all its might, including some rockets. It's a much better commentary on our relationship to Iraq (as experienced by redacted television news) than that annoying scene in 28 Weeks Later on the tram after the kids fly into London -- and it's much better than the 9/11 ash quote from earlier in the movie. But what happens next? The yuppies go inside, underground even, and cry about their woeful lot. At least uber-cutie Marlena (I want Lizzy Caplan's hairdo) doesn't shed any tears -- she's just kinda pissed. I wanted more of that (and less whining) to go along with my apocalypse.

Welcome Notes.

RWK: This is a post to welcome some estrogen into our midst here at VINYL IS HEAVY as I have extended invitations to not one, not two, but three fine young ladies to contribute posts on a regular basis (whatever that means). During the first week of the month of the year I mentioned, rather tangentially, that the first new member of our crew, Claire Twisselman, who I will let explain herself below, had been added to the masthead. Today I welcome publicly Sanaz Yamin, bookmaker extraordinaire, and Bryn Esplin, a dear and fellow Pavement lover. I met Bryn about a year ago in a section for a class lectured by this guy. Sanaz was in the course, too, but not our section. However, it was not until this past fall semester, in another class taught by that guy, that we three became buddies on the real. They are two of the funniest people I know. Plus, they've got taste and style. Here's hoping they blow up the sphere this year, too. Stay tuned for all kinds of cool from all three as we venture forth in 2008.

Claire's got a nerd alert: I'd read VINYL IS HEAVY since the summer when I met Ryland by chance in Los Angeles, one day into 2008. I'm flattered he decided to allow me to write for his blog because I'm not a film major -- and I'm not a rhetoric major -- but an English major. I'm an English major who likes movies more than books, when I'm honest with myself. (I also like fish tacos more than grilled cheese sandwiches but I eat more grilled cheese, so go figure.) Anyways, I'll try not to genuflect too much but I gotta say that I'm pretty pleased to explore the blogosphere in public now after a year of lurking. I don't know that much about movies. And I've never read any Stanley Cavell except what Ryland's quoted here. But I'm game. So thanks, Ryland, for welcoming me! I hope I can live up to the call!

be- Vinyl is heavy, and so am I.

Long-time listener, first-time caller here, and I couldn’t be more excited about contributing to ViH.

I’m terrible with introductions. Barring such a phobia, I would have introduced myself to my gracious host, Ryland, long ago; instead, I sat silently during hours of lecture, making metaphors, moons and eyes at him from afar. A fellow UC Berkeley Rhetoric major, I’m an ardent admirer of generous criticism, believing it neither oxymoronic nor indulgent. I hope to contribute to all avenues of ViH: film, music, images, discourse, and fish tacos, believing them inextricable and delicious. Besides unmanned explorations into the things themselves, I hope to also examine the contexts and the ways in which we enjoy or maybe even despise them.

My introduction, tardy, reluctant, inevitable, has gotten my voice this far: a soft, silent swagger, much more my style.

Sanaz says: First and foremost, thank you, Mr. Ryland, for welcoming me. And thank you, Bryn, for sending me your intro before I wrote mine. As well as agreeing that generous criticism is not oxymoronic, I would also like to add that neither are expert amateurs nor blind viewers. As a recently freed member of the latter and a hopeful prisoner of the former, I've come to view VINYL IS HEAVY as a venue for criticism, conversation, elucidation and interpretation. I couldn't be happier than strolling down this street with this company. Perhaps we could call ourselves "the Ambulators."