Lunch Links
The most fun you'll have being told to face the corner.
Loose Corner (1986) dir. Anita Tacher
Something of a spiritual prequel to previous Lunch Link “Virtual Insanity,” Anita Tacher’s “Loose Corner” plays with another blank room, focusing the whole time on an intersection of two walls and the floor. As originally intended, this would be shown as an installation on a large screen mounted across an actual corner. The intersection of lines where the walls and floor meet gives us enough bearings to make us susceptible to multiple perception tricks as cubes, balls and characters in glorious 80s attire seem to have massive or miniscule proportions or even grow or shrink in size. It’s fun to attempt to figure out which figures are sharing the same space and which have been composited. The effects also seem to grow more seamless as the short goes on (my favorite is the boy tossing the ball that makes the “floor” bounce and upset the furniture).
Anita Tacher, a painter as well as an experimental filmmaker working as far back as the late 1960s, has something of an experimental wikipedia entry. It claims she worked on a project called “Back Track” with Dennis Hopper, but a little extra digging shows it’s more likely the source mentioning it has it conflated with “Black Track,” a work she did with artist Dennis Oppenheim.
Much better documented is a somewhat sad point of Tacher’s life that intersects with “Loose Corner.” The original film featured her good friend and mentee, the groundbreaking photographer Francesca Woodman. Unfortunately Woodman died before the scenes were complete and Tacher eventually reshot her portions with someone else. Tacher’s subsequent installation piece was called “Light House,” in which an empty white room (not unlike the “Loose Corner” room) houses only an empty wicker chair. 35mm slides projected images of a young woman – present but absent – onto the chair. The piece was dedicated to Woodman.
“Loose Corner” has playfulness that wouldn’t suggest this offscreen heartache. Befitting of someone who could come up with an endlessly flexible corner, Tacher’s surrealist spaces evoke a range of experience, from silliness worthy of a Lewis Carroll inscription to the difficulty of losing a friend.
About the writer
C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
C. D. Ploughman’s ProfileTags for this article
More articles by C. D. Ploughman
The life and career of a man who found the extraordinary in the ordinary.
The Friday Article Roundup
An assembly line of this week's pop culture writing from around the Internet.
Lunch Links
State of the art special effects, little attention paid to plot - what's changed over the past 120 years?
And It is a material presenter of this week's pop culture writing from around the Internet.
The Friday Article Roundup
A catty roundup of great pop culture writing from the past week.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
M*A*S*H, Season Two, Episode Three, “Radar’s Report”
This is an episode of firsts – the first one narrated by someone other than Hawkeye, the first episode with Klinger as a protagonist rather than side character, and the first episode with Sydney Freedman (though here he’s referred to as Milton). Like all firsts, it’s a bit weak on all levels; the Klinger stuff is the strongest because a) he’s already been in quite a few episodes and this simply clarifies him and b) it establishes his motivation completely. He’s given the chance to get out of the army, and the price is that he be marked as a transvestite (I am aware the term is now considered outdated) and homosexual, and he violently rejects it because he wanted to be kicked out for being crazy (Klinger clearly lacking the courage of Jimi Hendrix).
The narration doesn’t work as well; the conceit is that Radar is, you know, writing a report, and they struggle to get good jokes out of that. They’ll do a lot better with Radar trying to learn to write by correspondence course later. And Sydney comes off completely wrong – a lot more grumpy and cynical than he would later. I suspect he was just written as a guy, and then the cast and crew fell in love with Allan Arbus and the character was written to his personality more.
The rest of the episode is kind of a whiff too – good jokes, but the material isn’t strong and never quite pushes where it would normally go. The most annoying example of this is Trapper’s story, where his patient is injured and ultimately killed by a communist and he finds himself holding back from injuring him back, and most of that is Trapper looking moody – it works during normal comedy scenes, but otherwise it falls flat. Similarly is Hawkeye discovering his girl o’ the week is married, then that she isn’t, then that she doesn’t want to marry him. It’s a whole lot of Things Not Happening.
“Get out of here, you pervert!” / “Pervert? Who bit who, Major?”
Clearly naming our resident shrink Milton Freedman would be uneconomical.
I’ll show myself out.
Conclave – kinda felt like this wouldn’t be my thing when it came out, and then people kept saying it was good, and then eventually I decided to watch it and found that it wasn’t really my thing. Solid grown-up filmmaking though, and for a while I thought it was going to play out as an unconventional detective thriller which I was pretty into. I never found the actual Pope-Off terribly compelling though, there’s some good acting there but when things came to head I felt like my reaction was more of an “eh, whatever” than a thrilled gasp.
I really liked Conclave, but you may have permanently marred it for me by creating the idea of an alternate movie called Pope-Off!, which could feature dance numbers, and which I now regret I will never see.
Sounds like the sequel to Python’s The Bishop!
Baby Billy’s next project after Teenjus.
Dicks: The Musical rewatch, a solid 3 out of 5 comedy musical wherein it wouldn’t hold up as a rewatch alone, but watching it with a friend is so much fun. (Friend in question when she sees the Sewer Boys: “What are you showing me?!”) It’s depressing that the anti-homophobia message feels very 2000’s-era politics to me with the angry cowboy and nun, but also is STILL relevant because a bunch of bigots are semi-firmly in charge here. Rare example of comedy outtakes being enjoyable as it’s clear everyone involved had a good time making this. (Nathan Lane on chewing and spitting out ham for puppets: “Of all the humiliations of a career in show business…”)
Part of me is interesting in seeking this out and part of me is kind of happy to have it live as a hazy alternate-reality portal in descriptions I hear from others. Maybe if there’s a midnight screening or something.
Malibu Stacy: America’s favorite eight-and-a-half-incher.
Kojak, “Case Without a File” – A PI is murdered and for reasons, Kojak plays at being a PI for a while. Even sleeping with the femme fatale who has all the answers. The plot makes no sense, the attempt to pay homage to classic detective stories falls flat, and the acting is uniformly meh. Script by Joe Gores, who usually does a lot better but who also maybe loves Dashiell Hammett too much.
Frasier, “Odd Man Out” – After a depressing dinner alone at a fancy restaurant, Frasier laments being single while the rest of the cast is in various states of dating, even Niles (who is recreating his first date with Maris). But a pair of random messages left on the answering machine in error lead Frasier to take a chance and meet the cellist who left them at the airport. The season finale is, in retrospect, designed to move Frasier along from “just divorced” to “fully single and ready to date,” and it does this well. Linda Hamilton is very good as the (married) woman who meets Frasier and gives him some very good advice. As the episode ends with Frasier spontaneously flying to Acapulco. With a gorgeous woman? Is it possible.
Overall the fourth season is steadier than the second and third, building a lot around Niles’s separation but also doing well with Martin and Sherry. Frasier is still the main character but it feels like the world doesn’t revolve around him as much, and i think that is good for the show. There are fewer utter laff riots, but the comedy is generally consistent, and the writers are more deft in jumping from subtle jokes to out and out slapstick.