Gutbrain Records

Sunday, 01 October 2006

Thanks to everybody who came to the Cawthray/Price/Zankowski shows in Canada! And thanks especially to Chris, Shauna and Lola for their hospitality. They make these trips up north so pleasurable!

The Pang Brothers, who had some success here with The Eye, have a new movie out, called Re-cycle. It's billed as a special effects extravaganza. I never saw The Eye but Alice, Gracie and I checked out Re-cycle yesterday. There's not much of a plot: a writer enters an imaginary world, much of it of her own creation. I guess it's somewhat similar to Existenz. In more ways than one, since I thought both movies were really boring. We bailed out of Re-cycle after about an hour. I fast-forwarded to the end, which I thought was really lame.

Gracie and I both liked Anthony Mann's The Tin Star (1957), a solid Western starring Henry Fonda and Anthony Perkins, with great cinematography by Loyal Griggs and music by Elmer Bernstein. Griggs makes excellent use of the windows in the sheriff's office. In film school they teach you about framing within the frame and The Tin Star provides some wonderful examples of this. Henry Fonda is a former sheriff turned bounty hunter who helps out the inexperienced, well meaning but naive new sheriff Anthony Perkins. In this scene Fonda and Gracie provide Perkins with much needed support.

I also watched The Ipcress File again. It's one of my favorite movies and a startling counterpoint to the James Bond movies which made use of some of the same talented people: composer John Barry and set designer Ken Adam, to name two. This is an espionage drama, not an action movie. Everything, even the story itself, is revealed slowly and quietly. Otto Heller's photography is relentlessly brilliant. Every frame is composed in an interesting way and frequently goes beyond aesthetic value to have a textual significance. For instance, when the identity of the mole is revealed, there's a wonderful moment involving a red lamp shade: the red agent is illuminated in this scene. It's a beautiful image all by itself but its layer of meaning makes it more exciting.