A NOVEMBRIST HISTORY OF CINEMA

Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967)
Hospital (Frederick Wiseman, 1970)
The Lineup (Don Siegel, 1958)
5 Against the House (Phil Karlson, 1955)
Humpday (Lynn Shelton, 2009)
The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953)
The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977)
Murder by Contract (Irving Lerner, 1958)
Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson, 2000)
The Sniper (Edward Dmytryk, 1952)
The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009)
Collapse (Chris Smith, 2009)
The Messenger (Oren Moverman, 2009)
A Christmas Carol (Robert Zemeckis, 2009)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009)
*Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009)
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (Rebecca Miller, 2009)
2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009)
Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958)
*A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009)
The Moon Is Blue (Otto Preminger, 1953)
Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944)
Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945)
Knock on Any Door (Nicholas Ray, 1949)
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2009)
An Education (Lone Scherfig, 2009)
Small Change (Francois Truffaut, 1976)
Home (Ursula Meier, 2008)
The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009)

*Theatrical revisiting

NOBODY DOESN'T LIKE PIPPA LEE

A slightly belated (for technical reasons) review of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee here.

CAMEOGATE: THE DAMNING LEAKED E-MAIL

From: Guy Pearce's agent
To: Kathryn Bigelow, John Hillcoat, various casting directors and producers
Subject: The New Guy
Timestamp: Approximately two and a half years ago

Hey guys, I just spoke with Guy and wanted to follow up with all of you. Guy still says he's really busy with other stuff, but that he hasn't lost interest in acting, he just really wants to be able to "cut to the chase" (his phrase). So he wanted me to sort of start getting the word out - without really officially getting any word out, if you catch my drift - that he's eager to work, he's just only looking to take very small but very significant roles at the very beginning or very end of modestly budgeted prestige pictures, preferably with genre elements or at least some amount of violence.

Okay, cheers.

NO OFFENSE, KID, I'VE JUST HAD IT UP TO HERE WITH YOUR FACE

The popular kid, Me and Orson Welles's Zac Efron, takes a brutal drubbing, or perhaps eyelash-plucking. I haven't seen this movie. Maybe everyone is right. Seems a little harsh, though.

"[W]ith every close-up of the brutally uncharismatic Efron we see not the outsized emotions of a naive teenager willing to do anything for art and love, but a Tiger Beat cover with a Depression-era hairstyle."
-Michael Joshua Rowin

"But in the spotlight, there’s a blandly eager high-schooler (Efron, unable to penetrate the cute), who’s conscripted into the zesty goings-on. Would someone please drag him offstage already?"
-Joshua Rothkopf

"Efron has yet to learn that smiling pretty is merely a component of acting, not its entirety. He makes for a supremely passive lead whose chemistry with Danes is nonexistent; he seems infinitely more enamored of his image in any reflective surface than in his ostensible love interest."
-Nathan Rabin

"Emphasizing the hollowness of the rookie’s trial-by-Orson story is Efron himself, who's prettier than Claire Danes (playing Welles’ secretary and sometimes screw toy) and who’s long-lashed, smirking, pristine nothingness made me want to hit him in the face with a shovel."
-Michael Atkinson

IDIOT BOX TALES

The Box was a cable television channel linked to a 1-900 number. Twenty-four hours a day, the station displayed a full-body image of the elderly thespian Frank Langella. You could call in and, for a fee of 99 cents, request a certain piece or part - any individual piece or part - of Langella's body be digitally erased on-screen for approximately three and a half to four minutes.

One time in seventh grade, my friend Marco stole his mom's credit card and came right over to spend the night. He finally got the nerve up to call in to the Box at 1 in the morning and asked for the epidermis; when his request finally came on, I just completely lost it and passed out. He had to use the smelling salts that he also stole from his mom's purse to bring me to again.

DANSE LIKE NOBODY'S WATCHING

Frederick Wiseman's new film, La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, opened at Film Forum yesterday. Here are some words I wrote about it.

WOULD YOU RATHER GET STRUCK BY LIGHTNING OR HAVE A TELEVISION CHUCKED AT YOUR HEAD?

I review two of this week's new releases, both of them fairly underwhelming, over at the L: Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire - is that subtitle legalese? a tribute to the novelist? both? does it matter? probably not? - and Act of God, an unfocused, wannabe-rapturous effort from the director of Manufactured Landscapes, one of the finest documentaries of the decade, if you ask me. I wrote a couple of paragraphs about that film here.

FALL CLASSICS

Lebanon (Samuel Maoz, 2009)
Sweet Rush (Andrzej Wajda, 2009)
Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, 2009)
Everyone Else (Maren Ade, 2009)
Surrogates (Jonathan Mostow, 2009)
A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009)
Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette, 2009)
Bronson (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2008)
*Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981)
The Night of Counting the Years (Chadi Abdel Salam, 1969)
Passion (Gyorgy Feher, 1998)
White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)
Boomerang! (Elia Kazan, 1947)
Baby Doll (Elia Kazan, 1956)
Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009)
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (Lee Daniels, 2009)
The Maid (Sebastian Silva, 2009)
American Torso (Gabor Body, 1975)
Shadowboxer (Lee Daniels, 2005)
Mellodrama (Dianna Dilworth, 2009)
Searching for Elliott Smith (Gil Reyes, 2009)
Satantango (Bela Tarr, 1994)
It Happened in Hollywood (Harry Lachman, 1937)
Underworld U.S.A. (Samuel Fuller, 1961)
The Crimson Kimono (Samuel Fuller, 1959)
Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949)
Act of God (Jennifer Baichwal, 2009)
Scandal Sheet (Phil Karlson, 1952)
La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (Frederick Wiseman, 2009)
High School (Frederick Wiseman, 1968)

*Revisiting