Happy Thanksgiving

Cat People

Through suspenseful horror, Jacques Tourneur's Cat People grapples with mysogyny (and xenophobia, although I'm not really addressing that here). Cat People an alluring movie, not just because of the subject matter, but thanks to the memorable way Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca drape each frame in dense, impenetrable shadows. It is an absolutely stunning movie to look at. Amazingly, especially by today's standards, you really never even see the titular cat; its presence is merely implied by editing, reactions, and shadow. This decision (whether budget-influenced or not) lends a psychological, nightmarish quality to the film, making it unclear whether the cat truly exists, or whether it is just a projection of the subconscious, of the escalating fears of the characters.

Zeitgeist

This is not something I would normally post, but I thought it was interesting, and something I wonder about, on and off. How will my generation accurately document its experience in movies, when such a large part of that experience takes place in a digital void? How does one go about expressing life in a digital realm, in this, the sleek age of ipad and Kindle? Thus far, the web's influence seems to have been on form, rather than content, reflected by a tendency towards more frenetic editing in action films and the like. In novels, Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves being my favorite example, the form of the text on the page, as well as the copious indexing reflects an audience that is accustomed to reading on the web. On television shows like 30 Rock, or Arrested Development we expect a short flashback or aside to explain a joke, and we also expect several concurrent storylines; it's like performing an immediate Google search to answer a question, or following several open internet tabs with unrelated subject matter. We are simply more receptive to information that comes at us quickly, from all directions, at the speed of surfing a trail of hyperlinks on Wikipedia. So, perhaps movies that are truly about the internet will remain on the internet in mediums that are purely of the internet. Like this:

The Player

I'm on a Robert Altman kick right now, probably because I keep finding used VHS of his movies from the 90s all over the place. I can't even begin to express my new found love of VHS. Very soon they will be entirely obsolete, but right now there are still buckets of them in video, book, and record stores everywhere with a fruitful combination of small, forgotten films, and great ones that have been re-released with equally great DVD packages. The only problem is that VHS does not supply a means for screen capping, forcing me to scour the internet for representations.