Month: May 2013

For his FILMography project, photographer Christopher Moloney aligns movie stills with their present-day backdrops. Buddy Bradley marvels at the continuity:

One of the things that’s so impressive, particularly in the US where everything always seems in a state of flux, is how some of the sites used in films from the 1940s and 1950s have hardly changed at all, or how the same sites have been re-used for different films, sometimes using different perspectives.

Henry Grabar appreciates the discrepancies:

The building don’t always line up perfectly; the colors seldom match. But the dissonance gives the shots meaning. (If you wanted seamless, you should have rented the movie.)

Explore hundreds of match-ups here.

(Photo: Annie Hall, 1977, and FILMography by Christopher Moloney)

Tom Shone defends sentimentality in film:

The Victorian disdain for sentimentality was, in part, a reaction against the rise of potboilers and romances written by, or for, women—and all too often, it came down to discomfort about emotional displays of any kind. A similar chauvinism prevails at the movies, a medium born halfway between the limbic system and the Kleenex box. When the New York Times praised Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”, an evocation of cinema’s early days, for keeping “the treacle at bay”, nothing would have struck the directors of that era as more heretical. Charles Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Frank Capra and George Cukor prided themselves on the accuracy of their strike at the audience’s emotions. The problem with “Hugo” was not that it was too sentimental, but that it was not sentimental enough. Scorsese couldn’t summon the ease with emotions demanded by the material.

That is what makes him a modern artist, just as sentimentality is the modern sin. We thrill at the pitilessness of directors like Paul Thomas Anderson, Darren Aronofsky and David Fincher, and we haze old-school empaths like Spielberg until they repent. The granddaddy of them all—the original cold haddock—is Kubrick, who made movies much the same way he played chess, to win before you’d even taken your seat, hence the nagging suspicion—happily embraced by his fans—that the best thing to do with a Kubrick movie is not so much watch it as submit to it, the way you submit to a superior argument.

Emily Witt embedded with Kink.com for a couple of intense shoots, including Public Disgrace, “an online pornography series that advertises itself as ‘women bound, stripped, and punished in public.’” Her takeaway:

It’s tempting to think that life before internet porn was less complicated. There are sexual acts in porn that it would not occur to many people to attempt. We have more expectations now about what kind of sex to have, and how many people should be involved, and what to say, and what our bodies should look like, than we might have at a time when less imagery of sex was available to us. But if the panoply of opportunity depicted in porn seems exaggerated, the possibilities are no less vast outside the internet. The only sexual expectation left to conform to is that love will guide us toward the life we want to live.

What if love fails us? Sexual freedom has now extended to people who never wanted to shake off the old institutions, except to the extent of showing solidarity with friends who did. I have not sought so much choice for myself, and when I found myself with no possibilities except total sexual freedom, I was unhappy. I understood that the San Franciscans’ focus on intention—the pornographers were there by choice—marked the difference between my nihilism and their utopianism. When your life does not conform to an idea, and this failure makes you feel bad, throwing away the idea can make you feel better.

Recent Dish on the lives of adult actresses here. My take on porn in moderation here.

Amy Fleming runs through many examples:

In his menu-deconstruction exercise, Poundstone refers to the £70 Le Balthazar seafood plate as a price anchor. “By putting high-profit items next to the extremely expensive anchor, they seem cheap by comparison.” So, what the restaurant want you to get is the £43 Le Grand plate to the left of it. It’s a similar story with wine. We’ll invariably go for the second cheapest. Set menus, or “bundles”, meanwhile, seem like good value and therefore give us an excuse to eat and spend more. Everyone’s a winner.

At one point in The Great Gatsby, Tom – Daisy’s husband – asks how Gatsby “got within a mile of her unless [he] brought groceries to the back door,” implying he was baffled by how two people from such different class backgrounds connected. The novel’s only hint is that Gatsby first met Daisy “with other officers from Camp Taylor.” Keith Gandal claims that raises a further question – how “a poor farm boy from North Dakota and apparently a German-American to boot, got to be an officer in the US Army when Germany was the enemy.” He does the detective work to find the answer:

The World War I American army, which had to build an officers’ corps of 200,000 rapidly and almost from scratch, needed some quick methods for identifying men who might be officer material, and specifically those who might make good captains. It developed a couple of unprecedented programs to do so: a rating system for identifying captains, and an intelligence test that identified potential officers and superior officers. The even more radical move that the army made — shocking to privileged young men, such as Fitzgerald, who expected traditional class and ethnic discrimination — was not to exclude immigrants and ethnic Americans from consideration for officer. (Indeed, the army’s initial plan was to have no racial prejudice and to open up such promotions to blacks as well, but the government under pressure from Southern civilian officials nixed the original idea of a complete meritocracy.) The army designated four training camps at which to pioneer the intelligence tests in late 1917 and Camp Taylor was one of them.

A further detail about Camp Taylor:

The other thing to know about Camp Taylor is that there were a large number of men of German descent there; by end of the war, they numbered nearly 1500. There is no doubt that the American army, though it was fighting Germany, had plenty of German-American officers.