the traveler's resource guide to festivals & films
a FestivalTravelNetwork.com site
part of Insider Media llc.

Connect with us:
FacebookTwitterYouTubeRSS

Blogs

Russellmania: The Missing Movie

No offense to Argentine screen vamp Coca Sarli, but Ken Russell is one hell of an act to follow.  

Starting today, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is presenting Fuego: The Films of Isabel “Coca” Sarli, and while entries like Leopoldo Torre Nilsson's The Female: Seventy Times Seven look plenty enticing – Sarli plays a femme fatale who undid both her husband and her lover – it's doubtful the three-day series will spark epiphanies like the Film Society's Russellmania.

Last night the week-long retrospective culminated with a screening of Tommy. Russell's 1975 screen adaptation of The Who's 1969 rock opera packed the Walter Reade Theater with fans so ecstatic they nearly whirled. In fact, during the Q&A one comely audience member went so far as to serenade the 83-year-old with a song inspired by another of his phantasmagorical works. Another devotee inquired whether Pinball Wizard Elton John got to keep his Doc Martens (yes), and a happy obsessive in the back asked Russell to comment on the film's ubiquitous use of orbs (no).

(Keith Moon was somewhat more forthcoming about his own jones for "big, shiny silver balls" when he told VH1 it was "yeah, sexual. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUNasgSiy7g&feature=related).

Crank though Russell is, he seemed genuinely charmed. But for someone who says three words where twenty suffice, the rogue auteur who suffers fools ungladly may have simply been relieved to have someone else take the mic.

One entry that was absent from the program was Russell's film version of the D.H. Lawrence novella, St Mawr. For good reason, though. He never made it. Locations were staked out in New Zealand and Australia; Russell regulars Ann-Margret and Glenda Jackson were signed on as female leads; and so were their male counterparts, Raul Julia and what must have been a seriously spectacular stallion. Too bad the October 1987 crash totaled this production about a woman so jaded by men she could only find passion with a horse.  

"Would you still want to make the film?" I asked Russell.

"Yes," he elaborated.

"I was supposed to join the shoot," I said.

He shot me an appraising look. 

I smiled and practiced shutting up.

"It's a good story," he nodded, meaning D.H. Lawrence's effort, not the production backstory.

And with that the man of infinite images and inspirations depleted his reserve of chitchat. So while we Russellmaniacs are waiting for his next creative bursts, anyone within shot of Lincoln Center this weekend can watch Coco Sarli in Fire. The 1969 film directed by her husband, Armando Bo, is about "a tragic nymphomaniac who cannot get sexual satisfaction from any single man or woman," per the playbill.

There's no mention of horses, but it may be as close as we come to St Mawr anytime soon. 

Mensche Marketing with Sobel Media

 I recently blogged in this space about the 19th-century writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. Rethinking his thing for self-reliance, I'm pleased to Ouija another dead white man, Hunter S. Thompson, who said, "He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master."

Thompson was just as sentimental about the TV business. "It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench…a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason" went his rant. He may as well have taken aim at marketing, especially today's merciless barrage of self-centered assaults on what's left of our peace and sanity.  

Which brings me to "Mensch Marketing."

For anyone unfamiliar with basic Yiddish, "mensche" means "someone of integrity and honor." The matchmaker behind its marriage to "marketing" is Mardy Sitzer, President of Bumblebee Design & Marketing. She mentioned it at last night's panel, "Building a Social Media Marketing Toolkit," held in the sleek Samsung Experience store at Manhattan's Time Warner Center.

Two people in the audience raised their hand when asked, "Is there anyone in the audience who doesn't know what 'mensche' means?" One was from India, and the other, from Larchmont.

As Mardy told me after the event, she got the "Mensche Marketing" idea from one of her clients while co-developing a marketing strategy with him. She found his "mind set… so personal and caring" that she plotzed, "Larry, you're the quintessential mensche!"

Hunter may not have been gonzo about it, but I found myself warming up to this marketing credo that asks not what you can do for the solicitor, but rather what the solicitor can do for you. "Who's taking care of you? Who's making you feel good? What's keeping you up at night?" These are the worries Mardy counsels her clients to take on. Above all, they should become great listeners.  
Bill Sobel

Like Ben Greenstein. The grandfather of Howard Greenstein -- social media strategist and President of The Harbrooke Group who chaired the panel – apparently became Long Island's finest butcher by remembering what all his customers wanted and giving it to them drippin' fresh.  

If only everyone tweeting and facebooking their wares took the cue from Ben and Mardy, civilization might yet survive 2012.
 
Wendi is another preacher of benevolence whom social media marketers should heed. That's Wendi Caplan-Carroll, Regional Development Director at e-newsletter company Constant Contact, who rounded out the panel. "Constantly look for ways to help," she counseled, and make it "funny, interesting, relevant and useful."

So, for example, were I marketing to you, I'd pass along some of the handy web sites that came up in the discussion. I'd tell you about NutshellMail.com, where you could get all your social media updates in a single email, gratis. Or about SocialOomph.com, which lets you cue up people who have followed you on various social networking services. Socialmention.com and gist.com are gumshoe services for your research pleasure. Then there's Bit.ly.com, which will help you shorten a long URL.

Maybe you already know about these sites, maybe not. If the latter, your life may have just gotten a jot easier.  

But don't thank me. Thank social media maven Bill Sobel, who presented the event together with Constant Contact and Samsung. And mark your calendars for July 28, 2010, "The Resurrection of The Music Video," featuring Zone4/Interscope recording artist Jared Evan. As the first installment of the SobelMedia/Samsung Experience Film and Entertainment Series, it's free. And you may just do some real live social networking.
 

Michael Powell's Stiff Upper Lip

You loved The Red Shoes. Black Narcissus almost made you become a nun. And, if you're like me, Stairway to Heaven is among your all time favorite movies. But have you ever seen a shot of their prodigious co-creator, director Michael Powell? Director Michael Powell

I hadn't until yesterday, when I ventured down to MoMA and caught the four-part documentary series English director and screenwriter Sally Potter cobbled together for UK's Channel 4 TV: Tears, Laughter, Fear, and Rage.

As le tout New York knows, mid-Manhattan's finest cultural shrine (not counting the penthouse bar at the Peninsula Hotel), is doing a Potter retrospective, and this heirloom from the 1986 hope chest is among the valued goods.

In the production, she asks a smattering of male and female types about lacrimal secretions, eruptions of happiness and other emotional stirrings. And while the eight-year-old boy advocating gender equality for cry babies stole my heart, and my laughter reflex tested positive during the Monty Python clips, it's Michael Powell who left the impression that won't easily be deleted. 

Such a measured soul. Such a force of nature. Those red McIntosh cheeks, those avuncular, crinkled eyes, that slo mo metabolism – that stiff upper lip! You haven't seen anything by Emeric Pressburger's creative collaborator until you've seen him rouse himself, after painstaking internal deliberation, indeed after entire glaciers have melted -- during which you could swear you've actually heard the neurotransmitters Morse Code discrete messages in his brain – and answer the question of whether Brits have stiff upper lips.

As the very dictionary illustration of self-restraint, with not so much as a crease in the skin connecting mouth and nose, the great man finally registers that yes, perhaps, and…he's…still thinking about it.

Watch, Read, Love

When you're in love, so is your bookshelf. One of the many splendors of sharing hearts is sharing recommendations of Great Reads. The mere fact that a title has captured your lover's soul invests it with magical properties often beyond any the actual book itself can reasonably be expected to deliver. No matter, because as long as it's an extension of your union it may as well be your baby, conceived by and in the Kodak Moment image of just you two.

So when a relationship dies, and with it, those cupid-slung lists of must-reads, it's a sad day not just for your love life but for your literary life as well.

All this to say, if you're suffering heartbreak or just between dalliances, don't miss The Pat Tillman Story. What does director Amir Bar-Lev's new documentary about the football star-turned-army corporal who fell to friendly fire have to do with romantic goo?

Emerson. As in Ralph Waldo. America's very own Transcendentalist philosopher, essayist and poet.

You may have read him at gun-point in high school, or even willingly gotten yourself into a college course with him and some of his 19th-century cronies on the syllabus. But you probably couldn't fully embrace him then, not like he deserves to be savored and relished and held to your bosom – as if the very object of your affections turned you on to him.  

Which is exactly what Pat Tillman does in the movie. The guy is so charismatic, so irresistibly adorable and cool, you can't help but fall in love. I defy woman, man or beast to remain impervious to his charms.

So when it comes out that this gravity-scoffing god, this Adonis from a Grecian urn, this Huck Finn of the Western wilds read Emerson, I took it as a personal whispering of sweet somethings: You gotta read Emerson! -- or, say, whatever Bill Clinton's billet-doux exhaled to Monica Lewinsky along with Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Start maybe with the essay, "Self Reliance."  You know Emerson's general rap about resisting conformity, and will surely recognize the line, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." But there's lots more where that came from. And if lately your instinct is telling you something or you've come up with a quirky idea, he's the go-to-guy for reassurance to take these voices seriously. 

Though it's dodgy to quote someone so devoted to self-direction that he shuns quoting, I'm such a fool for his essay, "Compensation," you simply have to have a taste:

"…The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in the fable admired his horns and blamed his feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved him, and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. As no man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or talents of men, until he has suffered from the one, and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same. Has he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he is driven to entertain himself alone, and acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl."

Mends his shell with a pearl! My knees are jello.

But okay, even if you don't Find Waldo, at least check out The Pat Tillman Story. The film's hero may have a ring on his finger -- and he may be quite dead -- but his spirit is guaranteed to steal all but the most helmeted hearts.

 

 

 

 

 

Newsletter Sign Up

Upcoming Events

No Calendar Events Found or Calendar not set to Public.

Tweets!