Day: February 9, 2010

Santa Barbara Film Festival chief Roger Durling conducted an intelligent and intriguing discussion last night with Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow at the Lobero theatre. You can’t hear him as clearly as Bigelow on my video clip, but that’s okay. The Loveless, Near Dark and Blue Steel weren’t right for me. Like many others I got on the Bigelow boat with Point Break, and it was clear sailing until September ’08 when I first saw The Hurt Locker, at which point she entered my all-time pantheon.

Here are Kris Tapley‘s impressions of same.

Rich Juzwiak of fourfour.com has compiled all the famous bathroom-mirror-shock scenes into one YouTube clip. He misses, of course, the seminal grandaddy of mirror-scare scenes from Roman Polanski‘s Repulsion (1965) — i.e., the moment when Catherine Denueve closes her bedroom closet door and the mirror catches a guy standing behind her.

The Repulsion moment happens around 1.35.

I guess Juzwiak didn’t use it because…what, it didn’t take place in a bathroom? The man is handicapped. His montage is a perfect distillation of the myopic mentality of film nerds for whom the term “older film” is something made in the early ’80s.

Stephen Colbert‘s latest Sarah Palin riff (which aired last night) concluded with a blunt but stirring punchline. (It took him a while to get there.) More crackling is the argument about Palin on Joy Behar‘s CNN show between the disapproving Ron Reagan Jr. and the Medusa-haired Pamela Geller of AtlasShrugs.com.