http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178 The beautiful science behind the beautiful effects of Tron: Legacy. Makes me wish I was better at C++ (evidently I wasn’t that much of a bastard in my past life enough to deserve that). http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178

Probably the movie I’m the most excited about in the coming year.

Possibly the worst movie ever made? Definitely feels like a de Laurentiis knock-off replete with gay culture theft, bdsm t&a heroines, and stop-motion animation (cf. “Flash Gordon”, “Dune”).

I believe in years to come, “Zero Dark Thirty” will be held in reverence with other great war movies like “Das Boot,” “The Battle of Algiers,” and “Saving Private Ryan.” All of these movies, while ostensibly about a battle or campaign were actually about something deeper: the human condition whilst under the bloody sky of war. Kathryn Bigelow’s film is special because its real task is not to visually portray events bookended by September 11, 2001 and the killing of Osama bin Laden, as the trailer or synopsis would have one believe, but rather to show a series of scenes to the audience which lead it to undergo the emotions that those who lived in that time period felt.

A beautiful description of what makes great movies great.

I love NYC-set film’s from the 70’s. They’re gritty and daring. We won’t be in town to see some of these, but Film Forum is showing a great festival of “gritty NYC in the 70’s” movies. Here’s the list A NEW LEAF SUCH GOOD FRIENDS ACROSS 110TH STREET COPS AND ROBBERS ALL THAT JAZZ AN UNMARRIED WOMAN LOVING CRUISING DEATH WISH DRESSED TO KILL DOG DAY AFTERNOON DRESSED TO KILL GLORIA GODSPELL THE WIZ HUSBANDS INTERIORS DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE KLUTE MANHATTAN MARATHON MAN MEAN STREETS Les Rues de Mean Streets MIDNIGHT COWBOY NETWORK NEWS FROM HOME SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER SERPICO SHAFT SUPER FLY SUPER FLY TAKING OFF TAXI DRIVER THE FRENCH CONNECTION THE HOSPITAL THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS THE HOT ROCK THE ANDERSON TAPES THE LANDLORD THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE THE WARRIORS ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR EYES OF LAURA MARS WHERE’S POPPA?

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Lauren Roth (@laurennicoleroth)

Gen-Xers complaining about the loss of “their MTV” (the one that showed videos) is now itself, a joke. Gen X-enters-midlife inaugural series “Portlandia” went so far as to feature an episode where Portland-based Xers united with our Cronkite (Kurt Loder), and our Barbara Walters (Tabitha Soren), and our ready-made music-guru buddy (Matt Pinfield) to stage a coup against the channel’s current Gen-Z-oriented, “Teen Mom”-pushing programming director.

She doesn’t care about your nostalgia, Harms

It’s hard to sell someone else on their loss. No one, reasonably, wants to hear about how great the party (or New York City, or San Francisco) was just before they got there. So, perhaps against type to my generation, I’d like to not say what the later-born lost because they were born after MTV was paved over with boy-band-friendly, gonad-vaporizing “TRL” and insipid reality shows gone horribly wrong (What hath “The Real World” wrought?).

Instead, I’d like to recall what humanity gained in that early era of videos. In this post, I’d like to recall and celebrate a director who laid down a gauntlet to say “We could do this ‘video’ thing with artistry and daring, like this.” The director was Englishman David Mallet who, in his visionary collaborations with David Bowie made profoundly memorable, challenging, and daring videos. Bowie and Mallett’s videos hinted that the medium could be more than musical ads to sell records. It could be an art form unto itself.

Nostalgia is a funny thing, and it gives our memories vivid colors that reality never had. I think Paul Simon, who has said many things well, may have said it best:

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
Give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

A few lines later the narrator lets this fact seep through:

I know they’d never match my sweet imagination
And everything looks worse in black and white

During the final days of Lauren’s pregnancy, we were watching some “comfort movies,” and we decided to watch 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. While I’d seen it three or four times before, it was only in this viewing that a profound truth became glaringly obvious: Richard Dreyfus’ iconic everyman encountering the ineffable, Roy Neary, is terrible.

In my Kodachrome® recollection, Neary has a Jamesian mystical experience that he can only render in sculpture (potato medium and purloined property), hunted by shadowy government officials and scientists he reaches Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, and is chosen by the extraterrestrials before he joins them to jaunt happily beyond Earth to frolic among the stars. It has the glitter and sheen of Spielberg of the early 80s: childlike wonder, lens flare, and the messy reality of family.

In black and white consideration though, the modern audience (myself included) asks: “Yeah, but what about his wife, his kids, the house he totaled?” The last they saw Dad he was in the midst of his Jamesian crisis and then he’s…gone.

As I asked myself this question, I had to ask, “why had I never thought to ask that before?” Only with some huge planetoids of socially-indoctrinated privilege could it be swallowed that Neary was a “hero” entitled to be a Terran ambassador of humankind’s best. But in the Kodachrome® memories of this film — he was. Privilege is a hell of a drug.

With the aid of critical theory (of the gender and economic kind), I’d like to unpack this movie a bit more.

Oh, and let’s just say what doesn’t need much saying: Teri Garr was criminally underused in this role.