Tuesday, August 03, 2010

Frozen Smoke

Well lookit that, I've been tagged with the delightful Screencap Images Meme Thing by Things That Don't Suck. This being about images, I'll keep the notes brief.

The ever mutating, frequently ignored rules, for those what don't know:

1. Pick as many pictures as you want, but make them screencaps. These need to be moments that speak to you that perhaps haven't been represented as stills before.

This web-bogglin is dedicated to the practice of using screencaps, rather than posed publicity stills, as illustration, whenever discussing onscreen specifics like composition, set dressing, performance and et ceteras. I learned it from Bordwell and Thompson! [Housekeeping note to self: Seeing the finished product below reminds me that I ought to widen the post column to accomodate bigger images.]

2. Pick a theme, any theme.

Glenn Kenny's entry in this fad required players to guess the connecting theme between frames. As I am not so subtle and none too clever, the theme below is obvious at a glance. You may guess the films if you wish, titles at the bottom.

3. You MUST link to the original gallery at Checking On My Sausages and the gallery at The Dancing Image.

4. Tag five blogs.

Everyone reading this may consider themselves tagged... LAMF!
And now to the screencaps.


"A smoker's a smoker, when the chips are down..."

"... and your chips are down."

The films:

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Leone, 1966)
Night on Earth (Jarmusch, 1991)
Deep Red (Argento, 1975)
Hellboy (Del Toro, 2004)
Cemetery Man (Soavi, 1994)
The Shanghai Gesture (Sternberg, 1941)
The Prime Time (Weisenborn, 1959)
The Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935)
The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999)
"No Smoking" (Kinney, 1951)
The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946)
Wild at Heart (Lynch, 1990)
The X-Files — Fight the Future (Bowman, 1998)
Twin Peaks — Fire Walk With Me (Lynch, 1992)

5 comments:

Joel Bocko said...

Fantastic theme - I never would have thought of it, yet in retrospect I'm surprised no one came up with it yet. Smoking and cinema certainly do go well together, to the delight of romantics and consernation of watchdogs since the days of the nickelodeon.

Brilliant variations on the theme too - Goofy, Frankenstein, and the eerie ashtray next to Laura Palmer. Bravo.

Joel Bocko said...

Great title too, by the way...

Stephen said...

A great idea, Chris.

Bogart and Bacall take it with ease - effortlessly cool.

Fire Walk With Me: "If I had a nickel for every cigerette your mom smoked, I'd be dead"

Colonel Mortimer said...

Surgeon General's warning, reading The Exploding Kinetoscope may result in second hand smoke.

Anyway, long time listener, first time caller (or whatever the blog parlance for that statement is) who is usually too intimated by your prose to comment. But this post prompted me to join the image meme, if you're interested my contribution is Cinema within Cinema:

http://colonelmortimer.blogspot.com/2010/08/cinema-within-cinema.html

Species: Cheekius_Geekus said...

Was the omission purposeful of (Rushmore) Bill Murray's depressed, hungover/drunk character in the hospital elevator lighting a SECOND cigarette next to the half-smoked one already in the other side of his mouth?

(Murray got lots of accolades for his acting in Lost in Translation, but I seriously thought he deserved a nod from the Academy for Rushmore (5 years earlier).