Last week in the brisk fall morning air, Cinecultist chatted with Stu Van Airsdale in Washington Square Park about two new releases this week, Margot at the Wedding and Redacted. You can see CC gushing about Noah Baumbach's use of natural light and trying diplomatically not to call Brian de Palma a hack over on the Reeler. That's right, see! Video blogging, it's the wave of the future, people. While CC does admit we need to hone our on screen persona a touch, don't you think we look and sound pretty good on the tape? Remember it was cold out there and we were talking totally off the cuff. Hopefully this is just the first foray into our on air movie punditry career.
CC saw both of these movies during our coverage of the New York Film Festival and another NYFF vet which we highly recommend, and is now out in theaters, is No Country For Old Men. This is a real return to form for the Coen brothers, sort of like if Blood Simple went on a road trip with Fargo to West Texas and was listening to a Cormac McCarthy book on the cassette deck. All the performances are pitch perfect, particularly the brusque Josh Brolin (who CC found oddly alluring during the post-screening Q&A) and the utterly freaky Javier Bardem. Be forewarned, his character Chigurh (pronounced "Sugar," if you can believe it) will haunt your nightmares. Go to see it, CC thinks its the best movie of the year.
Not dead. Promise. While we know it's one of the cardinal sins of blogging to let said blogging diminish to such a meager frequency it only consists of brief check in posts, that's what has happened to CC.
In lieu of lame apologies, some bullet points of what's been tickling our fancy lately:
* We bought a copy of the new translation of War and Peace put out by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky which the Times and the New York Review of Books have been raving about. Cinecultist promised our friend Adriane we'd set up a schedule of reading so we could discuss it, but apparently we'll not be able to beat the Bill Keller reading pace. Damn dude, you devoured 1273 pages (including summaries and appendixes) in a week, while also running the NYT? Impressive.
* Sometimes for giggles, Cinecultist tries to horrify the salespeople at Kim's on Saint Marks' with our DVD purchases. Unfortunately they're a pretty jaded bunch, but we thought we'd at least get an eyebrow raise when CC put Ratatouille and the Special Collector's Edition of Flashdance on the counter last Saturday. No dice. Both DVDs come with some nice extra features though. On Ratatouille, which is just as charming as it was in the theaters, you can enjoy a hilarious short about the history of rats as narrated by Remy and Emile. Flashdance also includes an extra disc of six classic toe-tapping, nose-blowing audio tracks. In fact as we type right now, CC is bopping along to "What a Feeling." Don't be surprised to see us decked out in leg warmers and t-shirts with the neck cut out shortly.
* If you aren't enjoying Gossip Girl on The CW already, Cinecultist suggests adding it to the DVR sched. It's surprisingly geeky and fun. Case in point, last week when the young Dan (Penn Badgley) wanted some tips when wooing experienced Serena (Blake Lively) he rented I Am Curious Yellow! References to kinky, experimental Swedish cinema from the '60s in a teen-sploitation soap? Awesome.