Along with movie fans everywhere, film bloggers bid farewell to Sydney Pollack this week. Bright Lights After Dark sums up the prevailing sentiment in the title of this post: Good Director, Great Actor. “One of the best, certainly one of the most unusual, episodes of the half-hour anthology series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, was 1960's 'The Contest for Aaron Gold.' Directed by Norman Lloyd and based on a story by Philip Roth, it’s about a camp counselor, a teacher of ceramics, who observes a special talent in Aaron (Barry Gordon), one of the boys he is instructing in arts and crafts. While the other boys are using their clay to make crude snakes and pots, Aaron is making a finely detailed sculpture of a knight. But there’s a problem. The sculpture is missing an arm, and for some reason, Aaron refuses to complete it. The night before the boys’ parents are due to arrive, the counselor decides to complete the sculpture himself – with unexpected results. I recall this episode today, among other reasons, because of the extraordinary natural performance by the actor who played the camp counselor. It was the late Sydney Pollack, and to see him in this role is to wonder why he didn’t have the major acting career of a Hoffman or a De Niro. Instead, of course, Pollack became a director, and - not surprisingly - directing actors was one of his greatest strengths.”
Arbogast on Film offers a somewhat more pointed appreciation. “Sydney Pollack rates about half a dozen references in Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock'n'Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, which means, I guess, that Biskind doesn't consider Pollack (who died yesterday at the age of 73) one of those saviors. Well, fuck Peter Biskind. I'm not knocking Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Hopper, Paul Schrader or Brian DePalma - I like a lot of their movies, too - but at least Pollack never got high off his own supply and turned into a pathetic caricature of himself.”
At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir has a post-Cannes wrap-up. “Along the Croisette, the enormous billboards for international co-productions that may never be made, let alone seen by the paying public, will quickly come down. This year's most ubiquitous and puzzling ad was pushing an Egyptian-made thriller (or something) called The Baby Doll Night, featuring a tank on a ruined street with a woman's slip hanging from its cannon. It asks: ‘Can one night of pleasure mend 60 years of pain?’ Well, I'm just not sure. Another total baffler was a film called The Seven of Daran: The Battle of Pareo Rock, which appears to feature a baby giraffe, two kids, a helicopter and the slogan: ‘A myth never been told.’ (Fellow blogger and Cannes drinking buddy Glenn Kenny prefers the tagline for the Jason Statham vehicle Transporter 3: ‘The rules remain the same. Except some changes.’)”
Cinema Styles proprietor Jonathan Lapper has put together a terrific movie clip montage called Frames of Reference. “I knew I wanted to take just one piece of music, and using no ambient sounds from the films themselves, edit together clips building a rhythm according to the natural rhythm of the music. I had another goal in mind as well. I did not want to move through film history chronologically, working from a hundred plus years back and moving forward or going in reverse, and I did not want to break it down into sections according to genre. What I wanted to do, and did, was take advantage of the language of film, the words and letters, and the fact that so many films, whether consciously or not, use the same shots, the same angles, the same movements when telling their story. And so the montage exploits these similarities and puts them to the rhythm of the music.” Watch it here.
And finally in List-o-Mania, ReezChannel commemorates the release of Sex and the City with a Tribute to Big-Screen Cougars, “that special breed of single woman, generally in her 30s or 40s, who tosses aside traditional notions of femininity with a bold, independent, sexually adventurous approach to life.” Has the world forgotten Lily Tomlin in Moment by Moment? (The correct answer is “yes.”)