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Under discussion:

Star 80  (1983)

When I first learned of Bob Westal’s Bob Fosse Blogathon, my plan was to write about Star 80, a film I’ve never seen but have long wanted to. I had ample time, in the ensuing month and a half, to track down a copy of Star 80 on DVD, watch it two or three times, and come up with oodles of brilliant ideas in relation to it.

But I didn’t. I lost track of time. I forgot. And I inevitably found myself wandering around the East Village on Saturday, looking everywhere but finding Star 80 nowhere. Even Kim’s on St. Marks, which has a full Fosse section on its DVD sales floor, didn’t have it. “These are supposed to be the spoils of living in New York,” I grumbled internally on the subway back to Queens. “My apartment is too small and my savings are non existant, but at the very least, if I want to buy something, I’m supposed to be able to find it.”

I wasn’t necessarily shit out of luck, re: the blogathon–I have a copy of Cabaret on my DVD shelf, I could have just written about that–but at some point on the way home I decided that my inability to find a copy of Star 80 was significant. It certainly said something about my own laziness, but it also speaks to the film’s lasting legacy. Made by an Oscar-winning director, based on a true story, featuring actors portraying debatably significant real-life figures such as Hugh Hefner and Peter Bogdanovich, Star 80 has nonetheless fallen into the dustbin of cinema history. Even YouTube, the crumb catcher for the toaster of forgotten pop culture, offers no help.

I don’t have any explanations. I haven’t even seen the movie. But I can ramble a bit after the jump.

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My experience with Norman Mailer, who died this weekend at age 84, was fairly limited, so here’s a look at some of the tributes to him springing up on the blogs:

• Jeff Wells recalls interviewing Mailer for the press kit for his final film, Tough Guys Don’t Dance: “He was in a pissy mood when I called him to do the initial interview. But we eventually got rolling and he gradually came to realize I wasn’t an idiot.”
• Lou Lumenick reruns an interview with Mailer from 1987, in which he explains why he chose to direct films without a script: “I figured the screenwriter had no control over the movie anyway — why bother with a script? Write the movie out of what you shot.”
• At The Guardian, Mark Hooper assesses Mailer’s real impact on the craft of filmmaking: “Ever the perfectionist, he complained about the phoney “punch” sounds used on movie soundtracks, and so he locked himself away with the sound designer and repeatedly punched himself in the face. The sound designer claims to have used the more accurate sound of Mailer’s masochism in countless features since.”
• Stu links back to The Reeler’s coverage of Mailer’s last public appearance, at the launch of a retrospective of his moving image work. At the time, Mailer assessed his filmmaking career thusly: “I was a bold amateur who had developed a certain confidence that if you bash into things with enough competence — if you have enough skills of another sort — you can translate a good many of them surprisingly.”
• Video evidence: Rex Sorgatz links to a TV debate between Mailer and Marshall McLuhan on Google Video; Mike at Bad Lit tells us where “you can watch [Rip] Torn whack Mailer with a hammer, whereupon the writer tries to chew Torn???s ear off.”
• I what I guess could be described as a dissenting obit in 5,200 words (!), Roger Kimball ignores Mailer’s side career as filmmaker and concentrates on slamming him for epitomizing “a certain species of macho, adolescent radicalism that helped to inure the wider public to displays of violence, anti-American tirades, and sexual braggadocio.” Fair enough, but couldn’t it wait until the corpse cooled?

Under discussion:

Sicko  (2007)

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters  (2007)

Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade  (2007)

Taxi to the Dark Side  (2008)

On the eve of the release of the documentary shortlist, the Academy’s list of semi-finalists for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar nomination, AJ Schnack does the math to rank the 30 best reviewed documentaries of the year. His findings might surprise you. Although the race’s obvious heavyweights (particularly Michael Moore’s Sicko, and the two Iraq docs produced by Alex Gibney No End in Sight and Taxi to the Dark Side), do make the cut, data provided by Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic reveals that the most critically beloved documentary of the year is none other than The King of Kong, directed by Seth Gordon, who we interviewed back in August.

Gordon’s video game rivalry doc certainly has come a long way since opening at Slamdance, where it competed for the attention of Park City with Chasing Ghosts, a Sundance entry covering some of the same ground and featuring some of the arcade all-stars. But Kong’s eventual dominance over that film by way of critical reception (99% on Rotten Tomatoes) and relative box office success ($678,000 so far, making it the eighth highest grossing doc of the year and one of the Top 100 docs of all time) may just have to be victory enough. With so many semi-high-profile non fiction films out this year about serious global crises, AJ implies that AMPAS might decide that Kong is too fluffy to make the shortlist.

This might be the perfect example to reveal the growing chasm between film critics and the Academy.

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