Oscar Blues montage: Honoring Spike Lee & Gena Rowlands

It's been a busy week. Since last Thursday, my long-delayed Fandor video on Anna Karina went up, I released three more (also long-delayed) videos that I'd been working on for a while (see The Killing & The Asphalt Jungle Side by Side and Rimbaud's "The Stolen Heart" in addition to this one), my short guest spot on the Twin Peaks Unwrapped podcast went up (and I also made appearances, via feedback, on a Star Wars episode of No Ship Network and guested on Obnoxious & Anonymous - jump to 35:16 for the beginning of our Twin Peaks season 3 speculation/discussion). Additionally, one of my videos was featured on this week's Twin Peaks Tuesday column on One Perfect Shot. After something of a dry spell in terms of productivity and (especially) output, the old saying "It don't rain but it pours" certainly applies.

With all of that catch-up out of the way, this latest entry in my Montage series may be the work I'm most excited to present this week. Its origins stretch back to my dissatisfaction with the Academy Awards six years ago, when I learned that they had decided to stop airing the Honorary Awards. Frequently given to film veterans who had never actually won an Oscar in competition, the Honoraries were a great way to pay tribute to the medium's past and remind us, amidst all the superficiality of the ceremony, that the movies are an art form created by imaginative, hard-working individuals, many of whom are misunderstood or underappreciated in their time.

Further explanation, relevant links, images from the video, and the Vimeo upload all follow the jump.

Fragments of Cinephilia, Pt. II

Short thoughts on: The deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni • The Wild One • The Virgin Spring • The Departed and Infernal Affairs • Bus 174 • Pan's Labyrinth and The Spirit of the Beehive • John Cassevetes and Noah Baumbach • The Stranger • Benito Mussolini's weenie

A year and a half ago, I transferred ten of my old comments from the Internet Movie Database to The Dancing Image, in a post called "Fragments of Cinephilia". This here is the follow-up: ten further memoirs of my pre-blogging days, in this case recycled from the summer of 2007 and including some great quotations from others. The topics range from heady to trivial: we start on a silent Olympus and end with a castrated dictator. Feel free to leave your own musings below - one of the pleasures of my old hunting ground (the IMDb) was the give-and-take, and I'd love to see it continue here. Enjoy.