1) Your favorite musical moment in a movie

Maybe This Time, Cabaret, the close up, where york and minelli refuse to look at the camera, the gauzy vaseline window shot, of him shirtless, the camp moments made earnest by new discoveries, and how languid is, how the cuts between stage, and boudiour are seamless, becaue its all grist for the mill, that minelli is hopeful and devastated by it, makes excellent work of her limited skills (she does false bravado better then her mother, who did it better then most) (and then at the end, where confusion in the audience, who is not used to earnestness, is not used to whores falling for love)

2) Ray Milland or Dana Andrews
DAna Andrews for the Oxbow Incident, though Milliands pulp trash work thru the 70s is something to admire (Frogs! Gold! both Battlestar and the Loveboat)

3) Favorite Sidney Lumet movie
full points to the tightness, and the paranoid construction of 12 angry men, but that said,
the group might be my favourite. a sort of cracked and broken cukor film, like a downgraded The Women, (and really one of the last womens pictures), much more restrained, and less neurotic then other loonie bin pix, with a glacial, tight, and almost frozen over performance by bergen--what suprised me, was how good he was at the biological politics, the gender construction of women, even in the mostly conventional views of their neuroisis...(plus the set design, the costumes, the lighting, it was all immaculate)

4) Biggest surprise of the just-past summer movie season
how boring batman with heath ledger was. the barthes joke in hamlet two. how little american movies shock anymore. chose one.

5) Gene Tierney or Rita Hayworth

Tierny was the better actor. Hayworth had Put The Blame on Mame. That 5 seconds of taking off her gloves in Gilda, not only erases Tierny's talent from memory, it reminds us how medicore the rest of Hayworth's performances were. So it's got to win. (also, the intimacy of the rheseral, and how it was kind of meta before its time, in the same film)

6) What’s the last movie you saw on DVD? In theaters?
I'm Not There. Hamlet 2.

7) Irwin Allen’s finest hour?\
Swiss Family Robinson

8) What were the films where you would rather see the movie promised by the poster than the one that was actually made?
Anaconda.

9) Chow Yun-Fat or Tony Leung
Tony Leung

10) Most pretentious movie ever
Marienbad (all robbe gillet's fault)

11) Favorite Russ Meyer movie
Fanny Hill, because it is hysterical to figure out how Meyers handles restraint, how he handles having to work for a studio, and how he has to adapt and work around a system that will collapse v. soon. For the same reasons, his Pandora Peaks film, is fascinating because his desire for craft, for the construction of visual narratives, for mad comedy is no longer needed, and he knows that all is left of his rep is a taste for huge tits and his own legend.

12) Name the movie that you feel best reflects yourself, a movie you would recommend to an acquaintance that most accurately says, “This is me.”
Pinnochio.

13) Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo
Mercedes D'Costa

14) Best movie snack? Most vile movie snack?
I dont get dots, but junior mints dumped in a vat of popcorn, with rootbeer on the side is my favourite.

15) Current movie star who would be most comfortable in the classic Hollywood studio system
Lohan would do the best with it, because she would be controlled and contained. Clooney could do some excellent work in it, but would feel stifled by the lack of autonomy, and his own politics. Ron Pearlmen (157 tv and movie roles since 1979), who isnt a movie star, or Scarlett Johannssen (30 since 1994), who is, work so fucking much, and have so little quality control, that they would not collapse at all under the pressure.

16) Fitzcarraldo—yes or no?

yes. (kinski and herzog deserve each other)

17) Your assignment is to book the ultimate triple bill to inaugurate your own revival theater. What three movies will we see on opening night?

1) secret cermony
2) butterfield 8
3) the sandpiper



18) What’s the name of your theater? (The all-time greatest answer to this question was once provided by Larry Aydlette, whose repertory cinema, the Demarest, is, I hope, still packing them in…)

the silver fox

19) Favorite Leo McCarey movie

Duck Soup, but that had nothing to do with LEo McCarey at all.

20) Most impressive debut performance by an actor/actress.

shirley booth in come back little sheba.

21) Biggest disappointment of the just-past summer movie season

heath ledgers joker

22) Michelle Yeoh or Maggie Cheung

Maggie Cheung.
23) 2008 inductee into the Academy of the Overrated
Batman

24) 2008 inductee into the Academy of the Underrated
Hamlet 2
25) Fritz the Cat—yes or no
doesnt really work as a film.

26) Trevor Howard or Richard Todd

Richard Todd for Dorian Grey (fashionably bisexual, and tawdry, sort of a back alley version of the high street performance, Todd claimed later that he didnt know it was soft core)

27) Antonioni once said, “I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules.” What filmmaker working today most fruitfully ignores the rules? What does ignoring the rules of cinema mean in 2008?
Mumblecore, most likely, bad and indulgent mostly, but refusing of spectacle for some kind of emotionally authenictiy, which breaks the rules of cinema, but adheres to the ongoing obsessive documentary culture.

28) Favorite William Castle movie
STraight Jacket. because whats scarier then an eldery, desperate Joan Crawford, esp with an axe.

29) Favorite ethnographically oriented movie
Mondo Cane. It does not pretend to be anything but honest explotation, plus cargo cults.

30) What’s the movie coming up in 2008 you’re most looking forward to? Why?
Miracle of St Anna, because it has a great cast, because Spike Lee knows how to shoot film, because it looks entertaining, that he has hidden his politics, under an obvious mcguffin.
Burn before Reading the Coens back to goofy comedy, and because i'm liking the little collective that is gathering around Clooney. (TILDA, Pitt, JK Simmons)

31) What deceased director would you want to resurrect in order that she/he might make one more film?
Dorthy Azner.

32) What director would you like to see, if not literally entombed, then at least go silent creatively?
Ron Howard (he can produce television)

33) Your first movie star crush
Tom Cruise or Michael J Fox

Sergio Leone Quiz.