A common regret is watching blog-a-thons come and go with nary a contribution from Culture Snob. So I was overjoyed to see the announcement at He Shot Cyrus for the “My Best Post Blog-a-thon”:
“Everyone should participate because here’s the best part: You’ve already written your entry!”
Lucky for me, I’ve maintained a Best of Culture Snob category that provided me with 22 candidates.
What surprised me was how easy the decision was.
The Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon ended yesterday, and while participation was ... selective, I couldn’t be happier with the submissions. My own writing aside, the blog-a-thon generated 14 15 new essays (as of July 15) and gave new life to a handful of others. More importantly, the work was often searching, naked, funny, touching, real, and resonant.
Tardy submissions are welcome, although reader interest in any blog-a-thon seems to peak near the beginning and die quickly once it’s over. (Self-Involvement Central reads by day: 123, 81, 68, 53, 56.) Late contributions can be made in comments, through the Culture Snob e-mail form, or in an e-mail message to snob@culturesnob.net.
One of the unfortunate side effects of running this blog-a-thon (while having a full-time job, a marriage, and an infant child, at least) was that the curator so far has only skimmed the offerings. I plan to rectify that this week, and I hope to offer some awards by week’s end. No prizes, outside of the satisfaction of a job well done and perhaps some graphic based on the crappy blog-a-thon logo.
In a prefatory note to his contribution, Michael Peterson noted:
“Have you noticed, in your Internet travels, that when it comes to blogging, the film critics seem to have a greater sense of community than many of the other groups?”Yes, I have, and I’m grateful for it. I might be a fifth-tier movie blogger (or sixth- or seventh-), but I’ve benefited greatly from the generosity of others.
So thanks first to the blog-a-thon’s contributors, who proved that they aren’t self-involved at all. Thanks also to the many people who linked to the blog-a-thon and sent readers who would have otherwise remained blissfully unaware of the self-involvement of others.
And with that, I am submitting my retirement papers for blog-a-thon hosting.
But as training camp approaches next summer, if I find myself with an unsoothable itch, I reserve the right to rescind my retirement and demand a trade.
These are things that just ain’t happening for the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon, for reasons of time, energy, and tone. Feel free to steal an idea — the blog-a-thon runs until Sunday, and we’re not much for deadlines. Or beg me to complete one in particular.
My Movie Body. In which I reconstruct myself (Frankenstein’s monster style) using the parts of movie characters/actors. But probably with Ewan McGregor’s penis, because I get at least one upgrade, don’t I? Inspired by a certain resemblance to Aidan Quinn.
Dearest Emily,
Right now, your primary activities are eating, reaching, sleeping, pooping, laughing, peeing, bouncing, crying, sitting up, and spitting up, but before I know it you’ll be running around and saying all the nasty words you’ve learned from your parents.
And before we get too wrapped up in soccer practice and homework, I want to ask a favor: Each year on my birthday, I want my present from you to be sitting with me and your mother and watching a movie, and talking about it afterward.
I’ve chosen a movie for each year through 2029 — when you’ll be 21 and I’ll be 58. I plan to be around, but if I’m not, please watch these with your mother on April 29. She’ll be able explain a lot.
A documentary short by Jeff Ignatius. Starring Emily. And the voice of Pamela.
When I said “self-involvement,” I meant it.
To mark the fifth birthday of Culture Snob (and the second day of the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon), some raw data and some calculations:
In five years, Culture Snob has produced 514 entries, 36 polls, and 17 commentary tracks — nine full-movie commentaries and eight of the five-minute variety. I have written roughly 450,000 words for the site — an average of about 250 a day, or enough to fill 1,800 double-spaced typed pages over the site’s life.
For many years, I’ve said honestly that I have no idea what trigger pushed me from being an ardent consumer of movies to a film lover. Alternatively (and ultimately less truthfully), I’ve said that there was no specific movie/incident, instead placing the transformation some time in the early 1990s. Occasionally, I’ve credited seeing Fearless in fall 1993, and the connection between Peter Weir’s movie and my father’s death.
The vagueness of my answers has long bothered me, but I didn’t do much about it. Watching the new Criterion release of Before the Rain was epiphanic, though: I recognized that the movie was a critical event for me.
So I decided to piece together my movie history in a way less random than previous efforts; I wanted to construct something coherent and meaningful.
It was a summer in the early 1980s. We were on a family vacation. Perhaps to Disney World. It seemed that at every stop on our journey, Under the Rainbow was in a constant loop on HBO on our hotel television. We must have seen parts of it a dozen times. Memory is a fickle thing, but I remember that the PG-rated farce had one bare breast that pops out when the little people are running through a communal dressing room, or somesuch.
I mention this because I can, as we have arrived at the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon, running Wednesday, July 9, through Sunday, July 13. This is the official Culture Snob birthday party, with this little site celebrating its fifth birthday on July 10. So give me a present: Write something for my blog-a-thon!
I’ll collect submissions in this entry over the course of the blog-a-thon. Links to submissions are best made in the comments, as work and Emily responsibilities will likely prevent prompt posting. (Self-involvement alert: baby pictures!) You can also send links through the Culture Snob e-mail form, or to snob@culturesnob.net.
When I first announced this Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon, I inexactly framed my goals:
“The Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon is about the intersection of movies and life [...] .”“Of course, we bring baggage whenever we talk or write about movies, but this is meant to be more personal [...] .”
(Self-involvement alert: the quoting of oneself!)
One commenter on another site correctly noted:
“Isn’t that terribly redundant, though? What else is the blogosphere all about except intensely personal reactions — to the cinema and everything else?”
She prompted me to clarify my intent:
“Most film writing is movies filtered through the self; I want the self filtered through movies.”
So there it is. As with my previous blog-a-thons, my goal is to write something new for each day, just in case nobody else participates.
Continue reading to see the submissions. (Last update: 12:05 p.m. CDT, July 15.)
Fuck off from Bizarro Box Office Power Rankings. You won’t notice any changes here.
Our rankings for these two weeks were won by two brand-new movies: What Happens in Vegas and The Strangers. Critics love them, and audiences are willing to have sex with animals to get into the packed auditoriums. My nemesis said he’d rather get a hot poker up his ass (probably a euphemism) than watch Cameron Diaz and Asthon Kutcher together, and I’m happy to oblige. To the most recent champion, The Strangers, me say: Watch out for The Happening and The Love Guru; they’re really picking up steam.
And to you assholes who say that Hulk and The Incredible Hulk are exactly the same, you are absolutely wrong. Me prove it to you.
Hulk. Opening weekend: $62,128,420. Second weekend: $18,847,620. Total after second weekend: $100,593,300.
The Incredible Hulk. Opening weekend: $55,414,050. Second weekend: $22,136,060. Total after second weekend: $97,055,430.
See? Very different.
Hello, and if you come back next week, I’ll kill you. Hate, Bons Erutluc
Stop reading for the weeks’ full rankings and the methodology.
(Through June 25, we are under the sway of Bizarro. Blame Piper at Lazy Energetic Eye Theatre.)
My distate for the stone-faced British comedian Rowan Atkinson is well-documented, as is my loathing for his signature creation, Mr. Bean. I like subtle, sophisticated verbal comedy as much as the next guy, but Atkinson takes it too far; I’ve been with people who stare at his almost subliminal act without a hint of a smile, unaware that the turkey-on-the-head routine is a joke.
But in spite of the insufferable Atkinson, I had reason to be hopeful about Mr. Bean’s Holiday.
(Self-Involvement Central is here.)
To mark the fifth birthday of Culture Snob — born July 10, 2003 — I’ll be hosting the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon from Wednesday, July 9, to Sunday, July 13. (Previously, I initiated the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon and latched on to Only the Cinema’s Short-Film Week Blog-a-thon.)
Put simply, the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon is about the intersection of movies and life. My hope is that it will serve as a celebration of the power of the moving picture removed from the critical, cultural, and financial contexts in which it is typically considered.
Of course, we bring baggage whenever we talk or write about movies, but this is meant to be more personal — intensely idiosyncratic reactions and analyses, difficult times when movies became more than movies, brushes with movie stars, crushes on movie stars, memories from youthful encounters with film, embarrassing revelations, cinematic epiphanies, meticulous drawings of Darth Vader from your eight-year-old self, ... .
The only rule is that contributions have two central elements: movies and you.
Submissions (or promises of submissions) can be made in comments, through the Culture Snob e-mail form, or at snob@culturesnob.net. New work is encouraged, but moldy links are welcome, too.
And remember: For once, it is all about you.
When you think of David Cronenberg, you’re likely to see fusion: Brundlefly, a living typewriter, a gun made of bones.
All of those are the work of Carol Spier, Cronenberg’s art director (from Fast Company through Videodrome) and production designer (from The Dead Zone forward, with the exception of Spider).
It’s easy to reduce Cronenberg to those signature images, which clearly reflect his longstanding concern with the relationship between technology and the flesh. Yet his two most recent movies — A History of Violence and Eastern Promises — have revealed a filmmaker of startling economy and density who doesn’t need to lean so heavily on those old tricks.
Cronenberg’s and Spier’s aggressive use of the tangibly repulsive — their creations have a physicality that’s unparalleled in cinema — obscure their more-mundane (but no less impressive) storytelling skills.
At the Too Many Projects Film Club, Jeremy Bushnell will host the Production Design Blog-a-thon from May 19 through 25.
It’s a fantastic idea.
It’s too long. We’re miffed by the nominations, and sometimes the process itself. The production numbers are cheesy and interminable. We’re displeased with the final results more often than not. Years later, we’re typically embarrassed by the outcome.
So let’s scrap the Oscars.
Even this year, when a reasonable and strong case can be made that the Best Picture winner was indeed the year’s best picture, all I heard were complaints. The ceremony was dull, and No Country for Old Men and Day-Lewis and Bardem were nearly inevitable.
So let’s replace this evil with another: We’ll choose the best movie of the year through something similar to the presidential-selection process.
The “Short-Film Week” blog-a-thon technically closed Sunday, December 8, but I’ll happily accept contributions as long as people send them (using the e-mail form or snob@culturesnob.net).
Blog-a-thons are unusual in the world in that they seem a genuine win-win-win proposition. The hosts of blog-a-thons get traffic from participants’ readers. Participants get traffic from new readers through the host(s). And the world gets new writing, analysis, provocation, and thought that it wouldn’t have had without the blog-a-thon.
In the case of Short-Film Week, we generated roughly three dozen new pieces on short films. This is a small, good thing.
While I hope that the people who host or write for or read a blog-a-thon benefit in some way, that doesn’t diminish the need to express appreciation for their contributions.
On the last day of the “Short-Film Week” blog-a-thon, I had planned to write an essay on a music video of my readers’ choosing. But my polling functions went poof this week, and I’ve written enough. So I’ll let two of the videos on my ballot do (most of) the talking.
I chose these two because I can’t imagine a more efficient way for their effects to be achieved: a poignant look at the career of Johnny Cash, and a dead-on spoof of NFL Films. Sometimes and somehow, the music video can do things (beyond the song) that seem impossible in any other format, regardless if the aims are serious or silly.
The guy who dominates Stefan Nadelman’s documentary short Terminal Bar could be related to Robert Crumb, both in his physical features and his matter-of-fact way. He talks about everything from death by alcohol to bathroom blowjobs to the “destituted” people who frequented the titular establishment where he tended bar for a decade. And like the famous cartoonist Crumb, he seems perpetually amused, and it looks suspiciously like a defense mechanism.
He tells of putting cheap liquor in the bottles of more expensive brands, and brags that not one person ever noticed.
In talking about the clientele, he says that the white, working-class patrons died off — often because of booze — and were replaced by gay black men. With a shrug, without bitterness or judgment, he says something along the lines of: If you become a gay bar, you become a gay bar. Whatcha gonna do?
His name is Sheldon Nadelman. He is not the subject of the 23-minute movie, but its character is drawn from him: lively, detailed, aloof, unfocused, and scattershot.
(A warning for sensitive folk: This essay discusses and uses screen captures from a short film in which a man conquers mammoth bare breasts and inserts his entire naked body into a woman’s vagina. [And, magically, the number of Culture Snob readers grows exponentially.])
An object within an object of the same type — the novel within a novel, the film within a film — is rarely considered out of its context. Its meanings, and its narrative or thematic roles, are derived from its conversation with the larger work.
But if the object is nearly whole — that is, if it’s not just a fragment, if we have a reasonably full sense of its shape, structure, and content — looking at it in isolation can bear fruit and is an act of respect.
The animated T.R.A.N.S.I.T. is a feature-film plot distilled into 10 minutes, and it shows the ways in which the short film is more forgiving than longer cinematic forms. This movie operates wordlessly almost as a plot outline, and it’s gorgeous to look at and challenging to keep up with. It feels like a small, perfectly cut gem.
On reflection, that’s a good analogy, because Piet Kroon’s 1997 short is a beautiful piece of visual craftsmanship that fails as art in any rational analysis.
Like most of his movies, David Cronenberg’s Camera is a sly piece of work. On the surface, it’s an illustration of the effects of lighting, camera movement, recording format, performance, and even costumes.
Camera appears to be Cronenberg’s most warm and human work. But it packs a lot into its running time, and, on closer inspection, it’s a downer about submission to addiction.
Why Are There Frogs Falling from the Sky?