“I was recently a bit too obsessed with the song American Girl by Tom Petty. Sorta perfect and it reps one of those weird moments where traditions far apart connect and merge into something new, when a southern kid got into new wave and a new genre was created.” [link]

American Girl is a song that lives near perfection; it is also used amazingly in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs. I’ve always appreciated how Tom Petty looks so skeletal…especially with the mirror shades. Like a singing skull.

“Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” is a grave and beautiful work of art. Shot in high-definition digital by a filmmaker who’s helping change the way movies look, it revisits with meticulous detail and convulsions of violence a short, frantic period in the life and bank-robbing times of John Dillinger, an Indiana farm boy turned Depression outlaw…” – MANOHLA DARGIS

“In 1979, Werner Herzog approached 20th Century Fox to fund a movie, based on a true story, about an overzealous rubber baron who wishes to stage an opera in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon. The producers loved the idea and were about to sign off when the discussion turned to a scene that involved pulling a steamship over a mountainous isthmus, from one river to another. “So you’re going to use a plastic model boat, right?” the backers asked Herzog. The director replied that the camera had to capture “a real steamship being hauled over a real mountain, though not for the sake of realism but for the stylization characteristic of grand opera.” He was met with icy stares, whereupon he realized that he alone would have to raise the money for the film. Over the course of the next two years, through perhaps the most difficult shoot in the history of cinema, he kept a production diary.”

Diary Excerpt: Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

Amazon

Netflix: Fitzcarraldo (stream)

Netflix: Burden Of Dreams (add) “This feature-length documentary from filmmaker Les Blank paints a riveting portrait of megalomaniacal German director Werner Herzog as he worked against almost insurmountable odds in the Amazon jungle to craft his epic movie Fitzcarraldo. Besides capturing the seemingly hexed production’s myriad adversities, Blank’s camera exposes Herzog as a man obsessed with his art and pressed to the brink of insanity to see his cinematic vision fulfilled.”

“Today, Ebert says “Do The Right Thing” should have won the Oscar for best picture. “It was so honest about the way people really feel,” he said via e-mail. “No hypocrisy. It generated grief and left us with a central question of American society.”

The best picture of 1989, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: “Driving Miss Daisy,” about the friendship between a white Atlanta woman and her black chauffeur.

It ends on a Thanksgiving in the 1960s, with the chauffeur feeding Miss Daisy a piece of pie.”

[link]

Just happened upon the blog of The Criterion Collection’s social network-esque community for film enthusiasts, The Auteurs, which features a “movie poster of the week” post. This piece is from a Milton Glaser designed poster for Next Stop Greenwich Village. As with everything they’re involved in, The Criterion Collection proves again that the details are worth inspecting. [link]

“Thus, we begin with Undertow. Prior to seeing this film, I knew exactly four things about it: 1) Its director is David Gordon Green; 2) Its star is Jamie Bell (or as I usually call him, “The kid from Billy Elliot“); 3) It’s set in the South; 4) Roger Ebert loved, loved, loved it.”

“Scorsese continues to undercut Henry’s labors throughout Goodfellas, but does so in an unusual fashion by offering the audience a brash, yet attractive visual style that conceals a simple critique. Though often criticized as a glorification of the mafia, Scorsese’s triumph is not merely in the direct method by which he seduces both his characters and his audience, but actually in how he deceptively spoils it all.” [link]

Criterion: Two-Lane Blacktop Essay