The venerable and exceedingly intermittent Plastic Podcast, which has outlived the two blogs with which it was intertwined, and whose audio archives were difficult to ...
An audio program about movies. Listen with your iPod or computer.
The venerable and exceedingly intermittent Plastic Podcast, which has outlived the two blogs with which it was intertwined, and whose audio archives were difficult to ...
Daily Plastic is a Chicago-based movie blog, a collaboration between Robert Davis and J. Robert Parks, the same pair who brought you the wearable movie tote, the razor-thin pencil pocket, and that joke about aardvarks. If you know the whereabouts of the blue Pontiac Tempest that was towed from the Plastic Parking Lot on the evening of August 7th, 2008, or more importantly if you've recovered the red shoebox that was in its trunk, please contact us at your earliest convenience.
Davis was the chief film critic for the late, great Paste Magazine (which lives on now as a website) from 2005 through 2009, and he counts this interview with Claire Denis among his favorite moments. Every once in a while he pops up on Twitter. He's presently sipping puerh in Chicago, even at this hour. Meanwhile, Parks, whose work has appeared in TimeOut Chicago, The Hyde Park Herald, and Paste, is molding unsuspecting, college-aged minds in the aforementioned windy city. Media types are warned to stay clear of his semester-sized field of influence because of the distorting effects that are likely to develop.
The © copyright of all content on Daily Plastic belongs to the respective authors.
I've posted a final scorecard for this year's Sundance film festival over at Paste. I have a few more capsules to wrap-up the coverage, and then I'll be back here at Daily Plastic with a backlog of goodies. Just you wait.
I wrote this short column for Paste Magazine some time ago and then forgot about it for a while. It's about the unique and curious work of artist Stefana McClure, and I'm glad to see it resurface on the web. Ironically it was cut from the magazine in the great 21st century paper shortage with which we're now all familiar.
Sundance 2009 opened this evening with a claymation film for adults called Mary & Max, from the guy who made that Oscar-winning short Harvie Krumpet. Sorry to make another pointer post, but for the next week I'll be blogging about Sundance over at Paste.
On one of our podcasts from last year we talked about how odd Hellboy II is, that it seems like the sort of thing made for young people or kids, but it has language and violence that you normally wouldn't put in a children's film. I'm not sure who it's for, exactly, and I feel the same about Mary & Max. Cute, sentimental claymation that touches on suicide, Asperger's syndrome, sexuality, depression, pharmaceuticals, drunkenness, etc. An odd mix. More at the Paste blog.
For more immediate and ill-considered reactions to films, watch the Daily Plastic sidebar or join us at Twitter.
Bay Area film writer Brian Darr polls his fellow San Francisco cinephiles at the end of every year to gather a list of favorite repertory or revival screenings, and reading the entries is always a testament to how much film is available to see outside the house. It's also fun to participate, since it means looking over all the year's screenings that weren't eligible for any sort of awards, even though they're often the highlights of the year. As Brian says, "No two eyes can witness all the splendid film presentations that occur in a year here," and "[c]ollectively, these fifteen lists might provide a reasonably accurate view of the range and depth of cinematic experiences to be had for a Frisco Bay rep-head in 2008."
Here's my entry, and from there you can find the others.
I was extra lucky to participate this year since I was only in San Francisco through May. Still, it was hard to whittle my list to ten. As J. Robert Parks has shown, the offerings in Chicago are rich as well, and one of my resolutions is to take better advantage of them this year.
Happy new year! I've posted my list of favorite films of 2008 at Paste, along with a bunch of extras and comments. Also, although the sequence isn't quite what I had in mind, I have a few more entries for our 2008 in Negative series to post over the next few days. I'd planned to push those out sooner, but the holidays got in the way.
Watch for J. Robert Parks to post his lists here at Daily Plastic soon.
Here's hoping 2009 brings everyone a little stability and brightness.
As the best-of-2008 lists begin to congeal around a certain body of films, the lists that attract my eye are of course the ones that contain outliers.
For instance: Kent Jones.
He likes Leos Carax and Claire Denis and Hou Hsiao-hsien; I've always appreciated his taste. Last year Hou's latest film, Flight of the Red Balloon, seemed to be underwhelming audiences at festivals (although not all of them) and then earlier this year seemed to slip into American theaters almost unnoticed, along with Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights, as if it were not a remarkable turn of fortune for a long-revered, contemporary Asian master with historically limited success at finding distribution in the US to be screening a film at the art theater of many American downtowns. Jones was one of the film's champions, and I appreciated his efforts on the film's behalf. (How interesting that a year later, Flight of the Red Balloon has just topped the indieWIRE critics poll. Meanwhile, the dentists who vote for the Golden Globes have never heard of the guy.)
For 2008, Jones' list of favorite films is buried inside a special issue of Sight & Sound, but let me pull it out for perusal:
From our discussion of the year in film, I must detour for a moment to examine the serious matter of titular ink.
The titles of most of the movies released this year had absolutely no punctuation, so adding even a tiny period, as Oliver Stone did, said something, don't you think? When he called his movie W. he said, hey (or perhaps look), this isn't M or Z or V or any such film. It's W., quaint as can be. In a title so short, even a period claims a good 8-10% of the title's ink, and that's not counting the serifs. The serifs matter. The period matters. This title smiles.
Looking back at the films of 2008, I can see that a punctational vision like Stone's was in short supply. Happy-Go-Lucky is sporting hyphens, sure, and Mamma Mia! is jacked up with an exclamation point, but think of how many more titles could be improved dramatically with a few well-placed marks.
Changeling!
Fireproof!
Saw V!
But we must respect the ability of such a mark to alter a film's thrust, sometimes irrevocably. An errant drip of ink can turn I've Loved You So Long into a Dear John letter (I've Loved You; So Long), create an equivalence that did not exist before (Beverly Hills: Chihuahua), change a title into a Craigslist ad for a vacation rental (Lakeview, Terrace), turn an innocuous teen romp into a Hair ripoff (High: School Musical), or transform a phrase into a sequence of events (Sex, Drive).
At the opposite end of some sort of rainbow from Roger Ebert is James Quandt, senior programmer of the Cinematheque Ontario and tireless scourer of the globe for lost prints of important films. His work often results in retrospectives that redefine a filmmaker's career or revive interest in forgotten masters. The prints he assembles, if we're lucky, work their way through the world's (too few) cinematheques, and if we're luckier still they end up on DVD, so I've been the indirect beneficiary of his efforts through many darkened screenings at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and now a few at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago.
Plus, I've only seen three of the ten films on his list (or four of the eleven, depending on how you manage the tally), which is perfect. His list appears in Artforum and comes to us online via my friend Girish Shambu. Please click through to see Quandt's top ten films of 2008.
Unlike Ebert's list, which for this active moviegoer elicits a string of yays and nays but very little action, Quandt's list has a different impact: it goes, almost in its entirety, onto my "films to see" list.
Roger Ebert. He's a film critic of the people and a fan of good movies. He watches a lot of them, and he writes with enviable energy. He's also firmly in touch with the mainstream even as he keeps a toe or two invested in more adventurous films. So his list seems like a fine place to begin.
This year, instead of ranking ten films sequentially he chose to identify twenty features, five documentaries, and one special jury prize, sorting each group alphabetically. Another reason his list is a good place to start is that I've seen all of these films. First, take a look at his list and read his remarks.
He chose the following features (listed alphabetically):
Every year, the lists. Lists lists lists.
And with each one comes trouble. For example, do we include films that we saw this year or films that were released this year? And how do you define "released?" Rules rules rules.
But more interesting than legalities are the inevitable philosophical problems. For instance, if my list omits a film that many other respected film watchers and blabbermouths have included on their best-of lists, does that mean I didn't like it or didn't see it?
I could answer that question in the accompanying remarks, but even an informative didn't-see-it seems to reinforce the year-end canon, a brick in the wall that keeps out the little movies that few people saw. Bricks. Walls. Slippery slides into oblivion. Make your own metaphor.
There's no solution, of course, but let's see if we can think of a new way to examine the field. Daily Plastic wasn't around last year, but with any luck this will become our tradition: we're going to dig into a number of year-end lists that we find interesting, one by one, day by day, and we'll examine not what they've left out (which will be covered implicitly by our own year-end lists) but by what they've included.
It's "2008 in Negative," not negative as an attitude but negative as a bas-relief.
At the end of the series we'll reveal our own favorites of 2008. I like to eject mine from the movie Jeep as the ball drops on New Year's Eve; my Plastic colleague J. Robert Parks prefers to mull the options well into January. Until then, we'll look at the early birds, the canaries in the mine.
And finally, our own lists:
