Errata is a web journal written by Robert Davis who has neither spent a night in a ghost town nor pulled a turnip from the earth. He doesn't even know if turnips grow in the ground. Perhaps on trees, like candy corn. Therefore, Errata is a non-commercial project.

Observation #1: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious."

Observation #2: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious" at the top of your lungs. Bring your eyebrows together before you say it. Effective!

Observation #3: Same for books. Even at libraries.

There is a prize for people who correctly guess the thing about Metropolis, Nevada.

Except where the text specifically states otherwise, Errata's vagaries are indicated vaguely and its authors are indistinct in the traditional way of the Internet, except where the authors lay claim to their work. In some cases Robert Davis lays claim to work that is not his own but has been abandoned like so many ghost towns. Except where held presently, fistfuls of dirt are suspended via dispersal, or dispersed via suspension (in the air), and thus their dissolution is their transcendence, or their transcendence is their dissolution. And yet our eyes tear, and our vision is impaired, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that one entity's gain is another's fit of sneezes. Except where indicated, storms shall outlive the clay upon which they rain, unless storms are improperly delimited by their clouds, which dissolve, rather than by their inevitable return. Thus the clay loses, unless the clay is said to own the storm, to use it to make itself heavy, to make itself cling to white garments, refuse dispersal, cake upon the facades of abandoned buildings, and sit like Man [sic] upon the earth where it is pelted by a storm that it owns. In which case the clay still loses, if you ask us.

Some of the above is legally binding and should be considered a mental contract between Errata and those upon whom it acts. The bit about the prize should be considered an overstatement insofar as prizes differ from dirt and prize dispersal differs from dirt dispersal. Please recall that ownership is a weight and, therefore, hope that you do not win the prize.

One day Errata or its representatives will call upon you for a favor. It is expected that you will hop-to without delay.

You may contact Robert Davis by email unless it's about the rock that was thrown in anger. The rock is more properly called a clod. Why do you continue to raise the topic?

28 November 2003

Rosenbaum On the Radio

Jonathan Rosenbaum was on a local San Francisco call-in show this week talking about the year's movies. Although this kind of show never allows one topic to stick around very long, he did have some interesting comments.

Showing why he's my favorite contrarian, he listed among the movies he liked this year Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, Stone Reader, Gatekeeper, Masked & Anonymous, Pistol Opera, Demonlover, School of Rock, and Down With Love.

About Down With Love (if you missed this like I did, you might want to know that it's already on DVD), he said that the people who made it weren't old enough to remember the 50s and 60s and as a result they kind of combined the 50s and 60s, which he thought was "actually kind of exciting."

About School of Rock: "If Jean Renoir had decided to make a movie about rock and roll musicians in the 6th grade, it would have been something like this. [laughing]" He called Richard Linklater, who directed School of Rock, "one of the very best independent filmmakers in the country," although he did School of Rock for hire.

About Elephant:

What I think is really interesting about it is— I think it got kind of misjudged by Americans who saw it at Cannes because they seemed to think it was a movie that was trying and failing to explain why Columbine happened. Whereas I don't think Gus Van Sant knows any more about this or has any more interest in it than the rest of us. I think what he's really more interested in is why we weren't able to predict something like Columbine. And it's really a film about following the lives of high school students just before something like this happened.

I happen to agree.

A few other choice tidbits:

The best films that I tend to see are things most people haven't heard of because they don't have multi-million dollar ad campaigns.

And about the term "independent":

It's Sundance and distributors like Miramax that have wound up confusing everyone. This is the way I make a distinction: an independent film is a film in which the filmmaker is independent of distrubution. If a filmmaker has final cut, then it's independent. And that means that Jim Jarmusch is an independent filmmaker because he owns the negatives of all of his films. On the other hand Quentin Tarantino is not an independent filmmaker because he doesn't have final cut. I mean what confuses everybody is that Sundance is supposed to be this big promoter of independent film but if a filmmaker succeeds at Sundance it means he or she loses independence because the studio buys it and is able to recut it.

If you'd like to hear more about these or other topics — vengeance as a theme in movies, the virtues of multi-region DVD players, In the Cut, Shattered Glass, Mystic River, marketing The Cat in the Hat at the U.S. Post Office ("We've lost the cold war. We're living in a Stalinist world"), and the much-discussed lack of video "screeners" for critics to compile their year-end lists — you can listen to the program online.

Posted by davis | Link

Reader Comments

December 4, 2003, 03:50 PM

Doug

Thanks for posting this, Robert. I actually heard last year's program, which also featured Rosenbaum, not so long ago, and found it pretty good listening. Interestingly enough, the RealAudio transmission cut off for me just as Rosenbaum started saying, "The Cold War is over. We're living in a Stalini...[silence]..." It's somehow a bit spooky. :)

I hope to get to the rest soon.

December 5, 2003, 12:56 AM

davis

Hi, Doug. You may want to sweep your computer for, uh, bugs.

I usually find this kind of show really frustrating, no matter what the topic. They just jump around too quickly. But this one was decent. I have a vague memory of hearing last year's show, too. I guess it's an annual thing. I'll have to mark my calendar.

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