March of the Cinephiles
Aug 14th, 2008 | By Rick | Category: News & Comment
Just a quick post . . . I’ve got family in town and I have to take them on the “Southern Heritage Tour.”
But I couldn’t resist passing along this hilarious post from David Bordwell’s blog. He describes, with great humor and — dare I say it? — accuracy, the one-upsmanship games that cinema lovers play . Here’s a description of what Bordwell calls the “depth strategy,” naming his cinephiles “Jules” and “Jim,” after some movie or another:
“Here the player goes very specific, invoking details that suggest sensitivity and massive memory power.
Jules: Great movie!
Jim: You said it. I especially liked the scene when the camera tracks sideways, picking up the back of the guy who’ll turn out to be so important at the end.
Jules: Yeah. . . Actually, I didn’t notice that.
Jim: You didn’t? Gosh, that’s the key to the whole movie. It sets up the last scene beautifully. Of course there’s also that killer opening line.
Jules (who doesn’t even remember the opening scene): Yeah, that was really effective.
Jules lost, and Jim knows it.”
Us bloggers would never do that, would we? Actually, on another blog, I heard one blogger claim he’s seen a certain movie 25 times, to which another blogger quoted his statement, and then said he’d seen it 60 times. I hope he was making an ironic statement on that sort of one-upsmanship, but I’m not sure.
Thank God we bloggers can engage in this sort of gamesmanship without all the messy, face-to-face, human interaction.
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Why, whatever are you talking about Rick?
I dunno … it was on a totally unrelated blog, one which I didn’t write a piece on the Coens for . . .
I seen that tracking shot movie 118 times!
There was no tracking shot in that movie.
Loved this!
I’ve read it 16 times now.
And I bet I laughed louder as well.
Ib, I’ve read it 17.
But I understood the subtext so much better than anyone else. The text, too.
Marilyn, I’m beyond understanding the text, I understand the hypertext, the ubertext if you will. The text that Truffaut would have written if he’d seen “The Big Sleep” 50 times like I have.
Anyone with a brain could see that Jules and Jim didn’t really care about that movie. That was just on the surface.
The deeper meaning behind that one-upsmanship session had to do with their mutual love interest played by Jeanne Moreau.
Of course, I don’t expect any of YOU to get it.
Everybody, you’re all wrong about everything. After analyzing the non-continuous style of editing, high-contrast black and white cinematography that’s infused by Renoir’s delicate humanism, I can say definitively that it was Colonel Mustard in the parlor with the pipe wrench.
This post - and it’s resulting comments - has given me much pleasure and joy.
And before you say anything, I’ve spoken with God, and he’s definitively stated that I’ve enjoyed it more than anyone else.
How can I argue with God? Well … Moses did it, several times, and HE lived to tell about it. But I know Moses, Moses is a friend of mine, and … What was I saying?
You’ve done it now Olson. YouTube has decided my Fall Trailer is defined by YOU! Drop by my place to see what I’m talking about.
Hee hee.
Ha, well, I was the first blogger, but to be honest the only reason I uncharacteristically pointed to the number of times I have seen a certain film, in this case Double Indemnity, was because someone else in the thread said that they had only recently seen it once, after having been exposed to Fred MacMurray in Disney movies like The Shaggy Dog, which I noted I have yet to see once. So, it was actually a bit of auto-criticism on my part (coupled with illustrating how diverse the respective paths of “cinephiles” often are) having seen one film so many times, to the point of exhaustion, and the other never (though I do plan on seeing The Shaggy Dog very soon, having recorded it from TCM recently!).
The David Bordwell post is hilarious, and it’s been fun to see it snake its way through the Internets.
Hehe, this is pretty good alright.
But is no one else interested in the Southern Heritage Tour!?!
Daniel, I’m glad you asked. My sister and niece were was down here — in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where the Marx Brothers jokes roam — and never being in the deep South before, were a-pinin’ (as we like to say) for a gen-u-wine southern experience.
The first day we called the “Southern Heritage Tour,” and we went South to the Moundville Indian mounds, all that remains of a sophisticated, pre-historical civilization of war-like native Americans called the Mississippians, proof that high civilization did indeed existed in the South at one time. After eating dumplings and fried chicken at Miss Melissa’s, we headed for Selma and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where in 1965 state and local police clubbed and teargassed peaceful African American marchers on what came to be known as Bloody Sunday. Finally, we toured the antebellum district of that town, looking at all the marvelous pre-Civil-War houses built on the backs of the ancestors of those who marched on Bloody Sunday.
Fascinating, Rick. I know most people think of New England when they think of American history, but it sounds like you have some real treasures down there. I’m a-pinin’ to see ‘em.