paean to piracy #2

David Bordwell on “His Girl Friday“:

The lesson that sticks with me is this. If Columbia had renewed its copyright on schedule, would this film be so widely admired today? Scholars and the public discovered a masterpiece because they had virtually untrammeled access to it, and perhaps its gray-market status supplied an extra thrill. Thanks mainly to piracy, His Girl Friday was propelled into the canon.

This part comes at the very end of his article but the rest of it is a good read too. As always!

Filed under: movie

movies movies!

I think I watched more movies in the theater over the past weekend than I have in like, the past 2 years. For someone who’s half in film school, I really suck at actually going to the movies.

Anyway, thanks to a rather nice job perk, I saw “Juno,” “Atonement,” and “Michael Clayton” on film, free! I thought they were all pretty good, which should be no surprise given that they’re all Best Picture nominees this year. Most def. worth the price of admission (not to mention 6 hours of my life).

On DVD I watched “The Awful Truth,” “His Girl Friday,” and “Killer of Sheep.” I’ll leave it to you to guess which one was a class assignment =D

Actually, the two Cary Grant movies are part of a 5-DVD set I bought last week because one of the films, “Holiday,” is for a class assignment. I mean, I guess I totally could’ve just rented it or gone ot the library, but I had a Border’s coupon and none of the films in the collection. The two films in it that I haven’t seen are “Only Angels have Wings” and “The Talk of the Town.”

I guess I’ll leave those for next weekend.

Filed under: movie

Gorgeous!

I’m swamped with things to do (it’s midterm season) but I couldn’t resist the chance to finally see UCLA’s 35mm nitrate print (rumored to have been the producer’s very own) of “Casablanca” at school. One of the profs screens it for his undergrad intro to film class every year. Which means the film print gets worse and worse every year, since every time it goes through the projector it’ll likely get more scratches and dirt.

On the other hand, people like the prof (and Henri Langlois) believe prints should be shown as much as possible because that’s what they’re meant to do. Some may even believe that the prints need to be ‘aired’ out like that in a regular fashion.

Whatever the case, I figured I should watch it before it got to the point where they couldn’t show the nitrate print at all. So no regrets! Such a fine movie.

Filed under: movie

oh, and lost RKO films, nice!

I was tickled to learn recently that Bordwell and Thompson write a blog. They’re the ones who wrote “ The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 with Janet Staiger, which contains some pretty fundamental stuff if one is interested in classical Hollywood cinema.

Anyway, today Bordwell wrote about some guy who gave a talk at their school (Madison) about his work on eyetracking in films. It’s really interesting, and I really like the psychology angle of it, but there was the added synchrony of a post in Boing-boing this morning about web usability guru Jakob Nielson’s eyetracking studies, which revealed some rather entertaining results. Bordwell seems to have read the same article, too, because he links to it in his own post.

Hilarious!

Filed under: fun, movie

oh, the irony

It’s been nearly 80 years since Sam Spade wandered the streets of San Francisco in search of the Maltese Falcon. Now, the statue is missing again.

John Konstin, the owner of San Francisco’s John’s Grill on Ellis Street, said someone broke into a locked cabinet on the second floor of his establishment and took a signed reproduction of the Maltese Falcon — one used for publicity stills for the movie — along with several vintage and signed books by and about Maltese Falcon author Dashiell Hammett.

Here’s a link to the full story in SFGate [via Boing-Boing]

Filed under: best thing, movie

Bamboozled

I just got back from watching that movie (“A Spike Lee Joint” from 2000) for my film class.

It’s pretty intense!

Filed under: movie