The Gleaners And LA

One of my favorite documentaries–and one that suckered me into making films myself–is Agnes Varda’s 2000 masterpiece, The Gleaners And I. [it’s $27 at amazon.]
It turns out that there’s an obscure gleaning law on the books in Los Angeles, and harvesting fruit that hangs over public property–like streets and sidewalks–is perfectly legal. There’s a website called Fallen Fruit that puts together neighborhood maps for anyone who wants to get to picking. [via boingboing]

Richard Dreyfus’s Living Room Was Booked

A friend just told me she is going to Devil’s Tower in Wyoming for a screening of Close Encouters of The Third Kind. It’s part of a 21-day tour called the Rolling Roadshow that screens films where they were shot.
Films we’ve already missed: The Last Picture Show [Archer City, TX]; Once Upon A Time In The West [Monument Valley, AZ]; Planet of The Apes [the first one, Lake Powell, AZ]; and Repo Man [in LA somewhere, just yesterday].
There’s still time to see The Goonies, though, and the movie tourist-weary locals only delayed the Sideways screening not cancelled it. Gives you more time to kick your tacky merlot habit.
Rolling Roadshow 2005 [presented by Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema]

Worth The Wait

2046_wong_still.jpg
Given its subject–loss and longing that spans and haunts the characters’ entire lives–wouldn’t it be perfect if the two+ year delay in bringing of Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 to theaters was somehow intentional, planned, not just a part of the marketing, but of the movie’s experience itself?
It was a gorgeously made film, with incredible cinematography [pace Christopher Doyle], sound, music, acting, production design. But it’s so sad, relentlessly sad. Maybe not the best movie to see alone and away from home.

The Zone 2 DVD of 2046 has been out since May [or mai, comme ils disent]

Alex Kuczyinski’s Desperate Plea For Netflix Recommendations

How else to explain this totally out-of-nowhere reference to one of the worst “short films on a theme by different directors” compilations EVER? Kuczyinski is fast becoming the Times’ new crazy auntie, Joyce Wadler.
“I wandered from one rack to the next, dragging my mitts over the textures and beading, feeling like Buck Henry in the 1987 movie Aria, when he spends an ecstasy-fueled evening stroking the iconographic statuary at the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, Calif.”
Let Clothes Be Your Guide to Adventure [nyt]
Look–but don’t touch, rent, or buy–Aria at imdb.com
Hey Alex, I have a Netflix recommendation for you–switch to greencine.

Alex Kuczyinski’s Desperate Plea For Netflix Recommendations

How else to explain this totally out-of-nowhere reference to one of the worst “short films on a theme by different directors” compilations EVER? Kuczyinski is fast becoming the Times’ new crazy auntie, Joyce Wadler.
“I wandered from one rack to the next, dragging my mitts over the textures and beading, feeling like Buck Henry in the 1987 movie Aria, when he spends an ecstasy-fueled evening stroking the iconographic statuary at the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, Calif.”
Let Clothes Be Your Guide to Adventure [nyt]
Look–but don’t touch, rent, or buy–Aria at imdb.com
Hey Alex, I have a Netflix recommendation for you–switch to greencine.

Serra Documentary At MIT 5/18

Tuhirangi_Serra.jpgDirector Alberta Chu’s 2003 documentary, Seeing The Landscape: Richard Serra: Tuhirangi Contour follows the artist’s production of a massive, 843-foot steel wall piece in New Zealand. Here’s a line from the synopsis: “A dramatic five years in the making, the Tuhirangi Contour finds Serra’s artistic vision at odds with his patron, his materials, his environment, and the harsh realities of physics.”
While I’m sure there’ll be a lot of conflict, I don’t think there’s much suspense about who prevails here. Serra’s whole artistic practice is built around pushing and expanding his understanding of his materials and the “harsh realities of physics,” and from what I understand of his commission agreements, a patron who stays at odds with the artist can very quickly find himself without an artist to be at odds with.
Still, this sounds like a great way to spend an evening: The film screens Wed. 5/18 at 7pm at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center. Chu will be present to discuss the work.
Buy Te Tuhirangi Contour, a book of photos documenting the finished work by Serra and Dirk Reinartz

Introducing The Lucas, The Dark Side of Film Rating

Dale Peck thoughtfully turns is hatcheting attentions from things that people should care about but don’t (books) to things they shouldn’t care about but do (movies).
And what he finds is, the current star-based movie rating system is inadequately and overly generous; it needs “a negative unit of measurement to warn viewers away,” a Dark Side, if you will.
Naturally, his proposal is based on things people shouldn’t care about and don’t (the ‘new’ Star Wars movies).
Go to his NY Observer article and see how, exactly, his new unit of evil film measure, The Lucas, works.
[But go soon. Here, I thought that the NYO had just bunged up their search function, gone even cheaper and crappier with their site by adding free/slow-to-update Google search, and given up on ever publishing persistent links to their stories, when in fact, they’ve done all that and started charging money for the stories you can’t find in the first place.]

Movie Theatre Rwanda

The awesome Haitian director Raoul Peck’s new HBO film about the Rwandan genocide, Sometimes in April, was the first film shot in Rwanda, and so he promised to debut it there as well.
Writer Melanie Thernstrom writes about attending the packed, tense screening, which was held in a giant stadium in Kigali.

A View To A Killing Field
[nytimes.com]
Sometime in April premiers on HBO Mar. 19 [hbo.com]
Related: Thernstrom’s book, Halfway Heaven, about the violent deaths of two immigrant students at Harvard, and an article about Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s 2003 epic novel-like reporting in Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx [nymag]

Clear Your Calendars [Except For Your Therapist]

The BFI’s National Film Theatre is running a complete Tarkovsky retrospective through March 30. It includes new prints of both Solaris and Stalker. And who can pass up seeing Andrei Rublev on the big screen? [I know everyone in NYC passed up seeing it on video; I bought an utterly unused copy, fresh from the newly dead Kozmo.com, on ebay a few years back.]
NFT: Andrei Tarkovsky [bfi.org.uk, via kultureflash]