One of our all-time favorite blog names is Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule; it really sums up the finest things in life in one pithy phrase. This week, proprietor Dennis Cozzalio has outdone himself with a mammoth rep report of his own, dedicated to specialty screenings in Los Angeles over the next month or so. A Mario Bava retrospective and a timely "Heist Films" festival are among the highlights, along with a series at the UCLA Film and Television Archives "highlighting the work of one of the pre-CGI greats of special effects, L.W Abbott. If you are of a certain age (like me), Abbott is probably directly or indirectly responsible for some of the most awe-inspiring images you eve saw in a movie theater, and maybe even one of two of your most indelible nightmares as well. Abbott started in the film business as an assistant cameraman on no less than Sunrise, ended as a consultant on the physical effects for 1941, and spent some of the multitude of years in between, for 1957 to 1972, as the head of 20th Century Fox's special photographic effects department. The series, entitled 'Wire, Tape, and Rubber Band Style: The Effects of L.B. Abbott', is an unbelievable gathering of amazing imagery (and occasional patches of some clunky dialogue, if I remember correctly) that effectively illustrates the great talent Abbott summoned to create some of the most spectacular sequences in movies during the '60s and '70s."
At The House Next Door, Dan Callahan offers up an appreciation of Shelly Duvall, "one of the weirdest and most beguiling performers to ever find regular work in movies." We're in total agreement that 3 Women is "Duvall's magnum opus, her tour-de-force for Altman. She wrote some of her own role, the unforgettable Millie Lammoreaux, a Texan Alice Adams/Stella Dallas, and Duvall plays this isolated, deluded creature with such risky comic and tragic precision that it belies (or maybe confirms?) her seeming lack of technique. Millie's eyes are blank, and she moves stiffly beneath her yellow sun dresses (the hem of her skirt always gets caught in her car door, marking her as one of life's big losers). You could call what Duvall is doing here minimalist, but that implies a choice of some kind, and I think that she's really just working within the set confines of her own droll personal style, as a person, as an artist, but not really as an actress, per se. Millie talks and talks to the air in her light, fey voice, like a Beckett heroine, and her inane babble reveals what artist Jack Smith once termed the 'uninterrupted commercial intrusions into our daily lives.'"
At Cinematical, Kim Voynar rebuts "another conservative rant against the liberal Hollywood machine" from Libertas, this one concerning "the movie industry's current favorite character, the sensitive pedophile." And here I thought the movie industry's current favorite character was the pregnant teen. I just can't keep up!
Andrew O'Hehir goes Beyond the Multiplex to explore "the boomlet of theatrical revivals and re-releases — often of obscure, forgotten or orphaned films — that has blossomed in recent years, even as contemporary films from all over the world beach themselves and expire on American sands."
Last week we presented our ten most anticipated SXSW screenings; Erik Childress of Hollywood Bitchslap has ten recommendations of his own. There is some overlap, but whereas Childress has actually seen his picks already, you might get more out of them than from our barely informed speculation.