jürgen fauth’s muckworld

We’re proud to present the April issue of the Mississippi Review Web, dedicated to fiction inspired by the movies. Check it out at MississippiReview.com or go straight to the pdf download. Featuring:

• Brandon Scott Gorrell: Godzilla
• Colin Bassett: Dance Party, U.S.A.
• Emma Garman: Talking with Françoise Sagan
• John Minichillo: Nearly Here
• Katherine A. Gleason: Fred Astaire Refuses
• Lori Romero: Rockfall
• Meghan Austin: Requiem for an Almost Lady
• Myfanwy Collins: Verbatim

Awards season has begun in earnest, preparations for the About.com redesign are in high gear, and the Phil Lesh Halloween extravaganza and marathon is upon us, so I’m resurrecting a category from the early days of muckworld, when everything was still hidden behind a password and we had a grand total of four (4) readers: that’s right, “Konsum” is back, a.k.a the sloppy roundup of everything I’ve been watching/eating/reading. We’ll get back to meatier individual posts as soon as the dust settles.

The photos above are from from last Saturday’s panel “Haverford and the Power of the Pen,” a title that makes me giggle and think of Indiana Jones. From left to right in the top picture: Luke, the friendly student moderator, Marcy Dermansky, author of Twins, David Behrman, publisher, Richard Lingeman, author/editor The Nation, Ron Christie, author of Black in the White House, and Alison Grambs, Friar’s Club writer and author of The Smart Girl’s Guide to Getting Even. In the photo on the right, Christie, Marcy, and Behrman. With a roster this diverse, the resulting discussion was plenty interesting, but I couldn’t stop thinking: we’re now one degree of separation from both Victor Navasky and Dick Cheney. Eek! More photos from Haverford and Bryn Mawr at flickr. On to the movies:

Diva
Film Forum is rereleasing this celebrated 1981 French film, and the press notes they’re handing out might as well have a fat disclaimer on top: anything you may have to say about his movie is redundant. There are pages of raves here by Pauline Kael and the like, along with a fascinating interview with Beineix that moots whatever you might want to add. Yes, Diva sparkles with ideas, every shot is a delight, every element aims to please — it’s a joyous celebration of the possibilities of cinema. Regardless, I better get a review ready for the Friday opening. Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981. *****

Open Hearts
Where does domestic melodrama end and soap opera begin? Susanne Bier’s dogme drama doesn’t care. Mads Mikkelsen is excellent as a doctor who falls in love with the fiancee of the guy his wife put into a coma. There’s a whiff of General Hospital about all of this, but it should go without saying that the acting and writing are far superior. Still: lots of people talking about theiremotioms in hallways. From the director of After the Wedding and Things We Lost in the Fire. Elsker dig for evigt. Susanne Bier, 2002. ***

Things We Lost in the Fire
Look, it’s a foreign film with Hale Berry, Bencio del Toro, and David Duchovny. Another Bier melodrama, this one slightly more appealing than Open Hearts because of del Toro and those adorable children. I’m hoping Marcy will review this for About. Susanne Bier, 2007. ***

Knocked Up
Another faux-transgressive family values commercial by Judd Apatow, filled with improbable characters and unbelievable plot developments. The jokes are funny exactly to the degree that you consider them “racy.” I laughed twice and shook my head the rest of the time. Who the hell are these people? Judd Apatow, 2007. *

Wheel of Time
Herzog gets fantastic footage documenting a Buddhist ritual in Bodh Gaya, India, but the film loses steam when when the action moves to Graz, Austria. The sand mandala is amazing, and who doesn’t want to see Werner cracking jokes with the Dalai Lama? Werner Herzog, 2003. ***

Zodiac
Reception of this Fincher epic was mixed, but I found the twists and turns of the hunt for the late-sixties California serial killer extremely compelling. Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr. are a great trio of leading men, and there’s an old-fashioned, All the President’s Men feel to the film. Because it’s based on a true, unsolved case, there’s no telling where the narrative will go next. Freed from the confines of formula, Zodiac also becomes a study of the nature of obsession. David Fincher, 2007. ***

Michael Clayton
Solid legal thriller about the moral quandry of a man who finds himself on the wrong side of an Erin Brockovich class action suit. George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, and Sidney Pollack are spot-on and the narrative is laid out without condescension. Tony Gilroy, 2007. ***

La Jetee
It’s always good to revisit the classics. YouTube has the entire film but Criterion is nicer. Chris Marker, 1962. *****

Citizen Kane
Like I said. There’s always new things to admire in Welles’s masterpiece–this time I was concentrating on details of the elaborate narrative structure. Orson Welles, 1941. *****

It Is Fine. EVERYTHING IS FINE!
Crispin Glover’s second film as a director, a mad sex murder mystery featuring a hero/villain with cerebral palsy, will require a few more days to digest. I’ll confess right here that I might have walked out if Mr. Glover himself hadn’t been guarding the doors; in the end I’m glad I stayed. He also performs a slide show with the film that has to be seen to be believed. David Brothers and Crispin Hellion Glover, 2007. ***

Bonus: I always thought that the Grateful Dead’s “Dire Wolf” was inspired by the Zodiac killer, but I can’t seem to find a reference for this — not even at David Dodd’s Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. Here’s a video of an acoustic ‘81 version anyway:

What good is having your own blog if you can’t brag about your girl? In a piece about MySpace and the book world in the New York Times Book Review, Pagan Kennedy devoted a paragraph to Marcy and her pioneering use of MySpace to promote Twins. I confess I used to hide the occasional sneer when she was compulsively befriending strangers instead of, say, writing the next book, but we all have our own ways of procrastinating, and hey, it worked for Lily Allen. Authors weren’t dime-a-dozen on MySpace at the time, and making people with her characters’ names into her “top friends” was pretty clever.

The only excuse I have for sitting through this straight-to-DVD clunker is the presence of Sarah Polley, who Marcy will see in absolutely anything. Ryan Phillippe, Piper Perabo and Stephen Rea are in it too, so how bad could it be?

Bad enough for the credits to misspell the star’s name: after an accident that left him dead for two minutes, Simon Cable (Ryan Phillipe [sic]) wakes up in a hospital with a case of that lazy old mindfuck standby, amnesia. He finds out that he’s got a wife who doesn’t love him (Perabo) and a lover who seems to (Polley) — but then things change again, because like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, he’s become unstuck in time, too.

The script, based on a play by Michael Cooney, dispenses the pieces of the puzzle at random, and it takes all of five minutes to suspect that it’s going to end like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Still, we were willing to go along with it, but I’m here to report that while The I Inside just barely held our attention, it utterly failed to repay it. Which is a polite way of saying that it features the lamest WTF ending I’ve seen in a while. Avoid.

The I Inside. Roland Suso Richter, 2003. *

The Alliance of Women Film Journalists, a group of female movie critics, reporters and feature writers, was founded in 2006 by Jennifer Merin, Maitland McDonagh, Joanna Langfield and Jenny Halper. Marcy’s a member, and I just got done redesigning their web site together with Katarina. You can admire the results at AWFJ.org.

The sidebar is home to an automated list of items I highlight in my feed reader (which, in turn, is also available as a feed) — but some of them deserve their own post. Here’s a roundup of the more interesting bits I found around the web lately:

• Watch all of Todd Haynes’ outlawed Barbie doll spectacular Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story on Google Video. Bonus: Lukas Moodysson’s latest. [via Ray Pride]
• The Friday Mix Tape: when he’s not scienceing Mouth of the Beast recordings or haunting the Knitting Factory after midnight, my friend Dan Alford is blogging groovy compilations at Hidden Track. Get his mix of Herbie Hancock covers here.
• Terrence McKenna’s Ex-Library: in what sounds like a tragic Name of the Rose tie-in, Quizno’s lays waste to the treasure trove that was the late psychedelic visionary’s library. [via Gpod]
• Long Island Nazis on Metafilter
• On her blog, Nina Hagen supports Britney.
• RSS Geekout: for those of us who use news readers to digest the interwebs, there is now Yahoo! Pipes and xFruits for remixing RSS feeds. For example, you can now read muckworld on your cell phone.[via Lifehacker]
• Cahiers du Cinema is now available online, in English. Very handsome and full of David Lynch. [via David Hudson]
• Marcy’s vomit comes in third at the Debutante Ball’s favorite line contest.
• If you’re still reading and looking for something else to click, go vote on our Oscar poll.

As much as I’d like to blame it on the rum, it was a clear, sober morning when I hatched the idea for a Caribbean homage to David Lynch.

What’s it about? A puppy in trouble.

Much thanks to my patient and inventive cast: Kay Aleksić, Stéphan Goldsmith, Roxie, Marcy Dermansky, Karl Supierz, Fedir Nikolayev, and Mike Bastin.

OUTLANDISH REPUBLIC (I insist on the capitalization) was shot on the run in various locations around the Dominican Republic, including Santo Domingo, Santiago, Sosua, and the Hotel Atlantis in Las Terrenas. Beware of the giraffe!

More muckfilms:

• Playa Bonita
• Alternadad
• The Flatbroke Stringband
• Glory Days
• Alien Stingers
• The Diggs Live at Sin-e
• In the Flesh: Marcy Reads from Twins

[tags]muckfilm, dominican republic, david lynch, youtube, dominican republic[/tags]