“The cinema is always as perfect as it can be”

10. Sick Days. I’m not dying or anything, but I do feel pretty lousy today and it would have sucked to have to go to work.

9. The End of the Semester. I’m crazy burnt out on school right now, but it will all be over soon!

8. Televised Football Games. In general. Movies lose most of their escapist value when you work with them and take film studies classes. This is how I spend most of my Saturdays and Sundays any more.

7. Fantasy Football Librarian. Once a day, FFL lets me lose myself in the “management” of my fantasy football team for awhile (I’m 6-4 with a good shot to win a game in the playoffs).

6. John Carpenter Movies. John Carpenter movies have temporarily replaced Groundhog Day (1993) as my favorite way to unwind on Friday night. Current favorite: probably The Fog (1980).

5. The Gentrification of the “Eastside.” I’m speaking exclusively as a gastronome here. Have you eaten at Dinette yet? Get the Grilled Eggplant pizza.

4. The Violet Hour. The most recent addition to my Five Best “Meals” I’ve Ever Had List: 1 Woolworth’s Manhattan, 1 Autumn Old Fashioned, 1 drink invented by our bartender, which was on the house. I had no idea a cocktail could be this delicious.

3. Thanksgiving. Oh man, I love Thanksgiving. I’ve e-mailed my mother at least thirty recipes in the last two weeks.

2. The Backyard Brawl. As much as I love Thanksgiving, it’s the day after Thanksgiving that I’m really looking forward to this year. I will settle in on the couch with a heaping plate of leftovers and a glass of wine at noon for what will hopefully be the de facto Big East Championship. Hell, Pitt might even win!

1. Ma Famille. They’re good people, they are. So extraordinarily patient. . . .

I’m still behind on my schoolwork, so the events calendar will have to remain out-of-date and this blog will have to remain on hiatus for at least a little while longer. I do want to take a moment to note that the Three Rivers Film Festival starts tonight with 7:30pm screenings at all three of Pittsburgh Filmmakers‘ theaters. The most intriguing one to me is probably the Pittsburgh premiere (I think?) of Pitt professor Carl Kurlander’s My Tale of Two Cities (2008?) at Melwood. Non-locals might know Mr. Kurlander better as the screenwriter of St. Elmo’s Fire (1985).

My tentative festival-going plans: for reasons of time and money, I’m probably limiting myself to the movies I can see on a six-ticket pass this year. I’m pretty sure I know what five of the six films I see will be: Waltz with Bashir (2008), Twists of Fate (2007), Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1960), Ballast (2008), and A Warm Heart (2008). I’d like to see The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), but $25 is a bit steep. We’ll see.

I remain confident that more will, in fact, follow. The festival runs through Saturday, November 22.

I’m heading to Chicago this weekend for some upscale food, serious cocktails, and quality movies. It will take me at least a week to get caught up with my schoolwork after I get back, and I have some projects due not long after that, so this blog will be on hiatus for awhile. It should be up and running again in time for the beginning of the Three Rivers Film Festival, but regard the film calendar as incomplete until then.

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Updated: The 3RFF schedule is now available. It’s a good one this year. More to come.

Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ October calendar is now available as a .PDF file from their website. Highlights for me: the Bruce Conner retrospective and the creative “Smokin’ Sunday Nights” series, especially since it includes Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), a film I’ve been meaning to watch again for some time.

There will be free screenings of a program of films by the late, great Bruce Conner on Friday, October 17 and Saturday, October 18 at Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ Melwood Screening Room. These screenings are being presented with the Carnegie International Exhibit Life on Mars; if we’re lucky a screening of films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, another filmmaker whose work is part of the International, is in the works, too.

The films by Conner that will be screened include Cosmic Ray (1962), Crossroads (1976), A Movie (1958), Permian Strata (1969), and Report (1967)

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Also related to the International: The University of Pittsburgh’s History of Art & Architecture department’s 2008 graduate student symposium, “Storytelling: Playful Interactions and Spaces of Imagination in Contemporary Visual Culture.” This event, held in collaboration with Pitt’s Film Studies department, will take place from October 10-12; it features a number of film studies scholars and cinema themes.

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Also at Pitt: An interdisciplinary conference called “Islam and Popular Culture in Indonesia and Malaysia” will be held at Pitt on those same dates, October 10-12. This event will feature a free screening of the film Gubra (2006) at Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ Melwood Screening Room at 7:30pm on October 10, among other things.

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Also also at Pitt: From September 26-October 30, a free film series called “Beur is Beautiful: Maghrebi-French Filmmaking.” Here’s the schedule:

Friday, September 26: Bled Number One (2006)
Thursday, October 9: Memories of October 17 (2002) and Memoire D’Immigres (1997) (Part One)
Thursday, October 16: Memoire D’Immigres (Part Two)
Thursday, October 23: Wesh Wesh Qu’est ce qui se Passe? (2001)
Thursday, October 30: Voisins, Voisines (2005)

All screenings will be held at Pitt’s Frick Fine Arts Auditorium and will begin at 7pm.

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Also also also at Pitt: Apparently, we’re in the middle of something called “International Week 2008″ that includes a number of film screenings. Here are the ones I didn’t miss:

Wednesday, September 24 at 4pm in Room 4130 of Pitt’s Posvar Hall - Kolya (1996)

Thursday, September 25 at 7pm at the same place - a two-film “Global Governance/Global Economy Film Series” featuring films called Life: The Story So Far (?) and Silent Killer (?). These screenings are all free.

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The City Paper’s “Fall Film Guide” includes information about an upcoming film series at the Warhol Museum that will include an October 4 screening of I Kiss Your Hand, Madame (1929), an October 31 screening of The Unholy Three (1930), a November 28 screening of The Big Parade (1925), and a December 12 screening of Prix de Beauté (1930). I can’t find any information about this series on the Warhol’s site, yet; I’ll post about it again as soon as I do.

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This week’s Jefferson Presents screening, which will be held at Garfield Artworks this Sunday (September 28) at 9pm, will feature “rarely screened films” by Stan Brakhage and Peter Gidal. Here’s what’s on the menu: Blue Moses (1962), Thot-Fal’N (1978), Aftermath (1980), Film Print (1974), and Condition of Illusion (1975). For more information, including descriptions of the films, check out JP’s website.

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Last, but certainly not least, the Pittsburgh Lesbian & Gay Film Festival website is live with information about the films that will be screened at this year’s edition of the fest, which will run from Friday, October 17 through Sunday, October 26. I haven’t had time to peruse the schedule yet, but one very interesting special event, 13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, which is part of the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts that I saw advertised on the New York Times‘ website this morning, and one film, XXY (2007), which has been written about fairly extensively by The Critics, jumped out at me. More on this later, presumably.

Dr. Keiko McDonald, Professor of Japanese Literature and Cinema at the University of Pittsburgh, died on Sunday at the age of 68. Many readers of this blog will probably be more familiar with her work than I am; I know her primarily as the teacher of a very popular undergraduate Japanese Film Studies course, a frequent visitor to the Media Center I work at, and a friendly, effusive lover of cinema. Thanks to her, I discovered a great many Japanese directors and films, first at the now-defunct CMA Cinema, later at screenings at Pitt and CMU sponsored by Pitt’s Asian Studies Center. She will be missed.

Carnegie Mellon’s Activities Board screens films four nights a week most weeks during the school year. They usually get 35mm prints, generally demonstrate good taste with their film selections, often fill McConomy Auditorium, their venue of choice, and charge but $1 for CMU students and $3 for everyone else (who doesn’t lie and say they’re a CMU student), making this one this one of the best places in the city to see movies. Typically, but not always, each film is screened three times, once around 8pm, once around 10pm, and once around midnight. Showtimes for the current week can be found here, and a schedule for the entire semester can be found here (it’s not complete yet). Welcome back, AB Films!

If I spent the next two weeks carefully shaping my thoughts about instant messaging into an article, it would look an awful lot like the one someone named Joe Kissell wrote for the web publication TidBITS called “Instant Messaging for Introverts.” Therefore, instead of writing said article, I’ll point you to M. Kissell’s. Here’s the opening paragraph:

From time to time, someone I know asks me an ordinary and reasonable question: “What’s your iChat (or Skype) ID?” My usual reply is to give them the information along with a big disclaimer: I’m almost never logged in. In fact, let me be completely honest and say I thoroughly dislike instant messaging (IM) except in a few specific situations. For months, I’ve been thinking about why this is - both the technological and psychological aspects - along with whether it somehow exposes a fundamental character flaw, and whether it’s something I should attempt to change. Having experimented with a variety of approaches to instant messaging (as well as its close relative Twitter) and having done a considerable amount of introspection, I’m inclined to think that my personality type is fundamentally ill-suited to instant messaging. Specifically, I’d like to advance the thesis that - for some people at least - an aversion to instant messaging is a natural consequence of one’s temperament, and that this is neither good nor bad in and of itself, though it does of course have consequences.

We introverts are a frequently misunderstood people. . . .

I obsessively checked Pittsburgh Panthers.com four or five times a week all summer long just in case Pitt decided to release the Men’s Basketball team’s 2008-09 schedule early. They didn’t, of course, but now it’s September and said schedule is finally available. I’m afraid it’s a bit of a disappointment: the 13-game non-conference slate could well include no opponents who are ranked at the time Pitt plays them. Furthermore, the team has to navigate two classic “trap game” situations: the November 25 game against a Belmont team that returns four seniors from the squad that lost to Duke by only one point in the NCAA tournament last year and the December 17 game against basically the same Siena team that won their first-round game against Vanderbilt. These are both home games, but I’m flashing back to 2006 when I first looked at Pitt’s schedule and thought to myself at Buffalo? What the hell?

If I’ve learned one thing in the last five years, though, it’s that Jamie Dixon knows what he’s doing, so whatevs, right? Go Pitt!

After the jump: brief notes on the last five screenings I attended.

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