Hooked on Movies: The Meetening
Tam, the International Film Academy kindly invited me to sit in on one of their sessions. In a typical town moment, I was assigned to photograph the very building where they meet. The White Buffalo Club’s meeting room is sleek and somber, a movie set of a room I’d like to use if we write a scene into Killpecker! of high level intrigue and cunning.
I took a few shots, stood there listening to Prof. Gail Segal, and in 10 minutes learned so much I fell into a deep funk because I could have used some of that knowledge thus far in building Killpecker.
So I’m going to try to fly-on-wall Wednesday (yeah, sure: I’ll work overtime failing to keep my yap shut). Gail will be cuing up portions of 70s classics, working toward an examination of Michael Mann’s Collateral, which eased my mind. I feared I was being fabulist by regarding Collateral as one of the most mesmerizing American films ever.
More later.
4 Comments so far
70s. Hm. I suppose it’s too much to expect they would mention one of my all-time favorite movies, Harold and Maude. (Did anybody else catch my all-time favorite musician, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens and then latterly known as Yusuf Islam and currently more politically-conservatively known as simply Yusuf, on Colbert last week?)
My very all-time favorite movie, Brazil, was made in 1985. So they have an excuse to not mention that one
Gee, I thought Collateral was OK, but not to the extent you do.
K m’love, in fact Harold & Maude figured into the program. (Someone asked, whatever happened to Bud Cort?) It was an instructive couple of hours today, dissecting a scene from Ordinary People. By framing a series of shots wide-to-tighter, we sense that poor Mary Tyler Moore ends the scene by offering to make sandwiches out of misery and denial. The intricacies are difficult to explain via keyboard — intricate! — but it sure taught me the importance of virtually editing a scene before shooting it.
Gotta admit, it’s a real joy to closely watch a few scenes of a fine movie and then hash out what we’ve seen (that is, what we think we’ve seen) with like-minded folks.
Brazil? That would deserve a 3-day symposium all its own.
Well, what was the consensus on Harold and Maude?
Wish I knew. It was among a handful considered landmark 70s film, like The Conversation and Raging Bull but not Smokey and the Bandit.
Wish I had thought of mentioning Brazil. Whatta litmus test.