Day: March 10, 2015

A Daily Kos report by Laura Clawson about Hillary Clinton’s “Eghazi” press conference, which was held a few hours ago at the United Nations, says that Clinton’s explanation will probably wash at the end of the day. Some have written that Clinton seemed to be lying when she said “I opted for convenience to use my personal account, which was allowed…looking back, it would have been better had I used a second email account and carried a second phone,” but who cares? “Public interest in the story is already low,” Clawson wrote, adding that Clinton’s explanation “feels like an effective performance.”

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In a February 2011 riff about John Landis‘s Schlock (’73) I mentioned a piano-duet sequence shot in The Old Place, a storied restaurant in the hills above Malibu. This morning I found a YouTube clip of the scene.   (It starts slowly but hang in there.) The blind virtuoso with a Zen attitude is played by Ian Kranitz. I’ve never understood why Landis, who directed, wrote and played the lead role, continues to refer to Schlock as “bad and appropriately named.” It’s cheaply made — shot in only 12 days for $60K — but it’s a lot funnier than The Blues Brothers and only sllightly less funny than National Lampoon’s Animal House. As noted four years ago, Schlock is “more than a genre spoof — it’s a combination of stoner humor and social satire in the vein of the old, occasionally surrealist Ernie Kovacs show of the ’50s and early ’60s.

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I’ve been missing screenings of David Robert Mitchell‘s It Follows (Radius/TWC, 3.15) for nearly ten months now. It played at last year’s Cannes, Karlovy Vary and Toronto festivals (among many others) and also at Sundance ’15, and has generated nothing but primo buzz. The 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating speaks for itself. A few days ago Boston Herald critic James Verniere advised me to “check this out if you haven’t yet…early Cronenberg vibe.” I intend to, but the truth is that I’ve been ducking It Follows because of an impression that it’s yet another perils-of-promiscuity flick about a hot girl being stalked by something ghastly — a cliche that stretches back to John Carpenter‘s Halloween (’78).

On top of which is Mitchell’s somewhat tiresome narration of the above N.Y. Times video essay. The opening shot, he explains, starts with “a slow, calm, objective shot of this sort-of middle-class neighborhood”…sort of? The Shadow of a Doubt-like, tree-lined, middle-class atmosphere is a right-down-the-middle cliche that’s also right out of the Halloween and Scream films and dozens of others in this vein.

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