Fritinancy

Word of the week: Doldrums

No, I’m not feeling particularly blah. On the contrary, I spent a rewarding weekend at the International Ocean Film Festival in San Francisco—my second film festival in three weeks, I’m happy to report. (The other one was Noir City, a film noir festival hosted by TCM’s “czar of noir,” Eddie Muller. In the Before Times, I typically attended at least four film festivals every year.)

The IOFF program included short and feature-length films and West Coast, U.S., and world premieres. One of those feature-length world premieres, Open Ocean, gave me the idea for this week’s word.

Doldrums and other sailing zones, via DifferenceBetween.net. No one is quite sure how “horse latitudes” got its name; theories include “it’s where horses died aboard ships” and “it’s as unruly as a wild mare.”

 

New writing: The International Ocean Film Festival

I’m back at EatDrinkFilms today with a story about the 19th annual International Ocean Film Festival, which opens in San Francisco on April 7.

I was a volunteer for the very first festival, back when it was called the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival. Today it’s the oldest and largest ocean film festival in North America, with year-round educational outreach as well as student-film awards and a traveling program. It was fun to talk with festival founder Krist Jake and film screener Sid Hollister—both of whom are fellow Dolphin Club members—and with Ana Blanco, the festival’s executive director for eleven years.

Read the story and check out the festival—in addition to the live screenings and Q&As there’s now a virtual program that brings great ocean filmmaking to your living room or laptop.

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Read my previous story for EatDrinkFilms, about a very special screening of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights with orchestral accompaniment.

On the Visual Thesaurus: The tales behind the Best Picture titles

For my March column for the Visual Thesaurus I take a look at the titles of this year’s Best Picture nominees, each of which represents a distinct style, from acronym to slogan to Biblical quote.

Full access to the column is paywalled for three months. Here’s an excerpt:

 

The Carpetbagger vs. The Projectionist

The Academy Award nominations were announced this week, which gives me an excuse to finally write about something I’ve been thinking about for a while: the name of the New York Times awards-season column.

The column was launched as a blog in 2005; its original author was David Carr, and its original name was The Carpetbagger. Its purpose was (and remains) “to cover the film world and give viewers a peek into how celebrity news is made, on and off the red carpet,” as a Times press release put it. Carr was replaced in 2009 by Melena Ryzik, in 2014 by Cara Buckley, and in 2018 by Kyle Buchanan, who remains the column’s lead writer. (Carr died in 2015. The column now appears in print as well as online.)

That Carpetbagger title always puzzled and troubled me, because the word has such a fraught history. (More about that in a minute.) So it was a relief to learn, in November 2020, that the column was getting a new name. And it was a surprise to learn, at last, the significance of the original title. (I’d missed the explanation when it was originally published.)

New writing: Chaplin's "City Lights" as you were meant to hear it

I took a break from creating names and writing about names to write about something else I care about: silent film.

Read “CITY LIGHTS: The Little Tramp Meets the Orchestra.” It’s about Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 silent masterpiece and what was involved in bringing it to Oakland’s Art Deco Paramount Theatre for one night only, with live accompaniment by the Oakland Symphony. 

Virginia Cherrill and Charlie Chaplin in City Lights. © Roy Export Company, courtesy of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

 

The story—which has lots of fun extras, including a clip from City Lights and a reproduction of the original 1931 pressbook—is my first published piece for the delightful EatDrinkFilms, whose publisher, Gary Meyer, is the co-founder of the Landmark movie chain and the founder of the Telluride Film Festival. The man knows his movies, and it was an honor to work with him.

Don't look!

The “disaster comedy” Don’t Look Up opens December 10 in theaters and comes to Netflix on December 24. Directed by Adam McKay (Vice, The Big Short) it features what Variety, in a pan, calls “a galaxy full of stars” and an all-too-plausible premise: “Two low-level astronomers must go on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth.”

Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett, Mark Rylance…

 

Does the title have a familiar ring? It should: Hollywood has been fond of “don’t-look” titles for more than half a century. In chronological order:

Word of the week: Omicron

Were you one of the thousands of people who, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, decided to learn a new language? Well, congratulations: You’re now learning Greek! Or at least the Greek alphabet.

The highly contagious Delta variant, named after the fourth letter of that alphabet, was first identified in India in October 2020 and quickly spread around the globe. And we learned last week that yet another troubling Covid variant had emerged in South Africa. It was named after the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet: Omicron.

How did we jump from fourth letter to fifteenth? The New York Times explains:

November linkfest

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate, and happy fourth week of November to everyone else.

My book recommendation this month is The Confidence Men, by Margalit Fox, the riveting true story of two British officers’ escape from an “escape-proof” Turkish POW camp—“the Alcatraz of its day,” Fox writes—toward the end of World War I. What makes their story amazing is how they did it: no tunnels, no violence, no weapons except for a homemade Ouija board and the two men’s skill at psychological manipulation.

 

 

I love a prison-escape story, and Fox tells this tale expertly, and Richard Elfyn, the narrator of the audiobook I listened to, rises to the occasion, switching between accents and occasionally reading passages in Welsh. But just as interesting as the escape itself are the conditions that enabled it. In his paywalled review for the New York Review of Books, Neal Ascherson writes:

Persuading people to like something is a trade. Persuading them to change their minds and like something else is a skill. But inducing them to believe in something that their senses and experience tell them is plainly unreal or untrue—unicorns, papal infallibility, Trump’s assertions, ghosts—requires art and almost manic self-confidence. The “confidence men” of Margalit Fox’s title, two British prisoners of war who planned the most eccentric and devious of all escapes, had plenty of both. But Fox puts their story into a broad historical setting, using it to illustrate the ways in which scientific inventions made possible not only empowerment but also credulity and manipulation.

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On the Visual Thesaurus: The lingo of film noir

For my latest Visual Thesaurus column I’m celebrating Noirvember—the monthlong tribute to film noir—with a lineup of classic noir slang.

The column is paywalled for three months; here’s an excerpt:

Word of the week: Oneiric

During the first year of the Covid pandemic, some people took up sourdough baking, others began studying a new language or learning to play an instrument. My preferred pastime was, and remains, film noir. Over the last eighteen months I’ve watched more than 100 noirs, many of them more than once, from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, from 1958, is often considered the last true film noir; I saw it once in a theater, years ago, and plan to see it again soon, after I’ve crossed a few never-watched titles off my list—Decoy (1946), Railroaded! (1947), and The Chase (1946) currently top the queue. I just can’t seem to get enough of corrupt cops, washed-up boxers, double-crossing dames, and hard-boiled shamuses.

I’ve been supplementing my screenings with books, articles, and videos about noir. (For a partial list, as well as ways to stream film noirs, see the end of this post.) It was in one of those books, Film Noir: A Very Short Introduction*, by James Naremore, that I came across this week’s word, oneiric, which sent me to a dictionary. It’s pronounced with a long-I sound in the middle—oh-NIGH-rick—and it comes from a Greek source, although relatively recently. It means “related to dreams.”