BROOKLYN, N.Y.—A titan of film criticism has truly passed.
Roger Ebert's death was especially stunning a mere two days after he had announced, at his blog, that his cancer had returned and that he was cutting back on film reviewing. Even in the midst of such adversity, he was still writing, planning...living. (Fitting that he called his upcoming scale-down of activity a "leave of presence" rather than the standard "leave of absence.")
It is Ebert's thirst for life that I'll remember from reading his writing, whether related to film or not. At his best, his writing exuded an openness to fresh ideas, impressions, sensations—and really, shouldn't this be the mindset of all critic? What made Ebert arguably singular among film critics was that he was able to convey his vision of cinema and the world in prose that was both eloquent and accessible to the layperson, without the insular shackles of academic theories to constrain his reach. To him, cinema had the power to reflect and illuminate life; you don't have to go too far than his recent reviews of The Tree of Life(with this as an even more illuminating corollary) and especially Synecdoche, New York (here's an addendum to it that he wrote) to grasp this. But, of course, if all you know about Roger Ebert is his television show and his thumbs, then you owe it to yourself to read him in print, whether online or in his books, and really get to know the man—because at his best, he was able to merge the personal and cinematic in ways that most of us would envy.
I can't say I ever really knew the man personally; though I did get to meet him and shake his hand at Ebertfest two years ago, I was never bold enough to actually, you know, contact him and maintain a steady correspondence. (My heart now burns with regret for not reaching out. Missed opportunities? Story of my life.) And yet, last year, he was apparently so impressed with my hypothetical Sight and Sound list for The House Next Door that he especially highlighted it in this tweet. (My editor, Ed Gonzalez, told me that my list absolutely killed in web traffic as a result of this.) I have no idea if Ebert remembered me when he posted that or if he just really liked the list; I guess now I will never know, sadly.
There is now a huge hole left in the world of film criticism—and heck, the world in general, if the outpouring of fond remembrances when the news broke yesterday is any indication—as a result of Roger Ebert's passing. But if his writing over the years—especially his more personal essays during his cancer-ridden years in the '00s, which to my mind, constituted his best recent writing—suggests anything, it is that he would not have wanted us to dwell on the fact of his death and would instead have implored us to return to living our own lives. I will do that, Mr. Ebert, while drawing strength from the very full and rich life you led.
NEW YORK—I was going to post this earlier in the day, as I usually do...but then, as I was trying to finish up this log late last night, news reports started coming in that Tony Scott had jumped off a bridge to his death.
Tony Scott, left, with Denzel Washington during the making of Déjà Vu (2008)
Despite a recent attempt in some critical circles to make a case for this filmmaker as a real auteur, not just a slick Hollywood craftsman (or hack, as some may more uncharitably label him), I'd never had an especially strong opinion either way on the films of the director of films as varied as Top Gun (1986), True Romance (1993), Enemy of the State (1998), Déjà Vu (2008) and many others. I remember hating just about every minute of Domino(2005), with its relentless ADD aesthetic and desaturated color palette, at the time, though I had read enough interesting defenses of the film that I was always curious to revisit and reassess. I loved his most recent film, Unstoppable(2010) (I expressed my giddiness toward the film here). And, for all its misogyny and nihilism, I've always harbored a sneaky affection for The Last Boy Scout(1991), a detective noir in the guise of an overblown Lethal Weapon-styleaction extravaganza. I still haven't seen either True Romance or Déjà Vu, two titles that many of the critics/cinephiles I read/follow on Twitter are citing as among his finest work. And whatever one may think about Scott's films, there's no doubt that, even as he continued working on a big, mainstream scale in his last decade, he remained as adventurous a filmmaker as ever, unafraid to challenge himself and push his style in new directions (for better or worse).
Details are still pouring in as to the circumstances surrounding his suicide. Whatever they are, though, this was really shocking and devastating to hear. My thoughts are with his family and relatives (especially his brother/fellow filmmaker Ridley).
RIP Tony Scott.
***
Nocturna Artificialia (1979)
Films
★ Nocturna Artificialia (1979, Stephen & Timothy Quay), seen on DVD in Brooklyn, N.Y. This Unnameable Little Broom (1985, Stephen & Timothy Quay), seen on DVD in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Naturally, after seeing the Quay Brothers exhibit at Museum of Modern Art, I was curious to catch up with their short films, to see how all the designs and props featured in the exhibition were used in context. So, one night this past week, when I found myself with nothing else I was interested in doing, I watched their two earliest stop-motion-animated shorts, Nocturna Artificialia and This Unnameable Little Bloom. Actually, the latter film's full title is much longer: Little Songs of the Chief Officer of Hunar Louse, or This Unnameable Little Broom, Being a Largely Disguised Reduction of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tableau II. (Who knew the Quay Brothers had beat Fiona Apple in the extremely-long-title contest years before When the Pawn Hits blah blah blah...)No matter; I wasn't hugely taken with that one anyway. Nocturna Artificialia, on the other hand, is both confounding and haunting in its wordless, Surrealistic evocation of a man—given an appropriately gloomy-looking countenance—stuck in a rut while dreaming of leaving his home on a newly built tramline going through his town. More Quay Brothers shorts to come; until then...
This Japanese film got a small belated release here in New York a few months ago; I missed it then, but, thanks to a kind of screener-exchange program in which I'm participating with some of my fellow Slant Magazine contributors—with the purpose of filling in blind spots before best-of-year lists are due towards the end of this year—I finally caught up with it sometime this past week.
As the title suggests, Quill charts the life of the titular dog, named "Quill" as the result of a birthmark he bears which looks like a quill feather. The U.S. title makes it sound like a nonfiction film; it's not, but it suggests the intriguing approach director Yôichi Sai takes with the material. Especially in the way the film is dominated by voiceover narration—first from the woman of a couple who trains him during his first year of life, then from the daughter of the blind man Quill eventually helps—the film ultimately comes off as an odd hybrid of educational documentary, Au Hasard Balthazarand Ikiru. Sometimes the approach is refreshing in its resistance of easy anthropomorphizing; about as often, however, Sai can't resist hitting sentimental, tearjerking notes hard. The thin characterizations don't help either, especially when the film gestures that we're supposed to be emotionally affected by what happens to these people/creatures towards the end (the rather insistent score by Kuricorder Quartet is the worst offender in that regard). Nevertheless, Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog—a film that is as much about making something meaningful out of one's life as it is about a cute guide dog who changes a stubborn owner's life—does have its genuinely affecting moments, and its sheer earnestness does count for something.
Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966, Harold L. Warren), seen with live commentary from Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett at Regal Union Square Stadium 14 in New York
As someone who never watched Mystery Science Theater 3000 during the 1990s, and thus was not intimately familiar with the episode that introduced a whole new generation to the awesome terribleness that is Harold L. Warren's Manos: The Hands of Fate, I thus had no intention of seeing a theatrical transmission of the three MST3K guys—now doing their schtick as "Rifftrax"—doing a live encore Thursday of one of their most popular acts of snarky movie commentary. But then, on Thursday, one of my co-workers—who has quite the taste for trash cinema, and has talked about Manos every so often—mentioned that a friend of his had bought a couple of tickets to the event and now needed a +1. I didn't have any plans that night, so I figured, why not? Turns out, though, that this friend of a friend not only had bought four tickets, but also couldn't go himself—so, in an email, he asked me and another of his friends if we'd be willing to take the tickets off his hands. The other guy couldn't do it, so, in what I assume was a fit of desperation, he basically decided just to give the tickets to me, free of charge.
Hey, free tickets! Who wouldn't take advantage of that, right? Honestly, though, I did have my hesitations—not so much because I ended up not being able to find three people with whom to go see this (but then, I've had so little success soliciting company for just about anything on social media that I didn't expect anyone to bite from the outset, especially on such short notice), but because, after being mostly kind of bored by that supposed '80s trash classic Miami Connection when I saw it last month at New York Asian Film Festival, I had concluded that maybe fetishization of bad cinema just wasn't something I was into. Why would I want to waste my time watching a movie that I knew was going to be crap going in when I could be watching something that had a better chance of being at least interesting and possibly great?
But I eventually decided to go...and I guess being in the presence of Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett—all part of the MST3K cast back in the day—making all manner of wisecracks over a film as blatantly inept as Manos: The Hands of Fate will make the experience of sitting through even the junkiest cinematic trash heap tolerable. And boy, is this baaaaaad. Terrible acting (was John Reynolds's goofy limp as The Master's villainous henchman Torgo supposed to be, like, menacing or something?) with even worse post-synch dubbing of all the actors, a music score that's unbelievable in how inappropriate it is for a "horror" movie (think '70s hardcore-porno cheese), and some of the most incompetent bits of continuity editing I've seen in quite a while—yes, Manos really is as awful as its reputation. The brilliance of some of the MST3K boys' jokes lay in the ways they wittily highlighted why certain moments were bad rather than just indulging in above-it-all snark; to my surprise, the commentary actually did add a weird sort of value to the whole experience. But I guess that was what Mystery Science Theater 3000 did best.
Manos: The Hands of Fate is indeed the worst film I've ever seen (and by the way, no, I still haven't seen anything by Ed Wood). In that sense, this was some kind of landmark of sorts. More to the point: I actually enjoyed watching it! But then, I had a lot of help in making the experience of it enjoyable. Maybe I need the MST3K guys to provide voiceover commentary for every bad movie I see. Well anyway, moving on to good movies now...
Cosmopolis (2012)
★ Cosmopolis (2012, David Cronenberg), seen at Walter Reade Theater in New York
And yes, this adaptation of Don DeLillo's 2003 novel of the same name is quite good—to my mind the most vrai Cronenberg film since he went "accessible" with A History of Violence back in 2005. That said, for those of you who may have been put off by the overly talky nature of his last film, A Dangerous Method, you won't find much relief here...and if you don't warm to the oddball cadences of Don DeLillo's highly stylized dialogue coming out of these characters' mouths, you may find parts of Cosmopolis to plod as much as A Dangerous Method occasionally did. This, however, is a much more surreal picture in its details: The rear-projection Manhattan glimpsed during the first interior shot inside Eric Packer's (Robert Pattinson) limo, coupled with the utter lack of background noise other than the sound of the actors' voices, indicates early on that this won't be taking place in any recognizable "reality" by any means. And as Packer makes his long, strange trek across town just so he can get a haircut, the episodes get—to borrow a Lewis Carroll-ism—curiouser and curiouser.
Here, finally, are the glints of Videodrome-era madness that I thought had been near-subsumed by the more "respectable" Cronenberg of his recent films. But all of his usual themes are here: the war between total intellectual control and darker inner emotions, bodies turning on the humans housing them, and so on. To those themes, Cosmopolis adds heavy doses of deadpan black comedy and a financial-crisis-allegory angle; as Packer experiences the meltdown of his financial empire in the back of that limousine, the world around him—which he barely recognizes in his singularly insular existence—seems to be falling apart in a sea of Occupy Wall Street-ish anarchy. All of this builds up carefully to a final confrontation between Packer and a former employee of his (Paul Giamatti) that is one of the most gripping sequences I've seen in a movie all year.
So overall, I liked Cosmopolis; it's quite possible I may fully love it on a second viewing. Oh, and how is Robert "Edward Cullen from Twilight" Pattinson in this, some of you maybe wondering? Well...let me put it this way: He can certainly do dead-eyed soullessness quite well.
★ Le Jour se Lève (1939, Marcel Carné), seen at Film Forum in New York
Ah, Jean Gabin: so masculine yet so sensitive, a man's man with the heart of a romantic. Of course, the world doesn't always operate the way the characters he plays in movies like this or, say, La Bête Humaine and Grand Illusion think they should. So it goes with François (Gabin), the metals worker who falls for one woman, Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent); carries on an affair with another, more experienced and world-weary woman, Clara (Arletty), even though he still has his heart set on Françoise; and finds himself opposed by jealous Valentin (Jules Berry), the unsavory MC who runs a dog show featuring both Françoise and Clara, and who has carried on relationships with both of them. Quite the series of romantic entanglements, that! Within the complicated plotting, however, Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert—both more widely known for teaming up to make Children of Paradise(1945)—successfully manage to evoke all sorts of nuanced emotions and broader themes underneath the surface melodrama. It's a deeper film than it at first appears—and it's all capped off by one hell of a final shot uses gunsmoke and a ray of sunlight to beautifully evoke the bleak "daybreak" of the title.
In My Head (1985)
Music
Slip It In (1984, Black Flag)
★ Loose Nut (1985, Black Flag)
★ In My Head (1985, Black Flag)
None of the songs on these three albums match the sheer blazing energy of Damaged(1981), but that assumes that Black Flag intended to make the same kind of album as their debut in the first place. Actually, as Henry Rollins, Greg Ginn & co. waded deeper into the 1980s, the tempos became slower, the songs got looser (giving Ginn more opportunities to simply improvise and riff) and the lyrics became more introspective in nature. I can't say that I'd play these albums as much as I would Damaged, but there are plenty of fine moments in all of them, especially in those two '85 albums.
Rise Above (2007, Dirty Projectors)
After my detour into Black Flag, I finally decided to listen to this album of covers of 11 Black Flag songs from Damaged. None of these covers sound anything like the originals, so give Dave Longstreth & co. points for at least being imaginative. But why does "Depression" sound so damned happy? Why does "Thirsty and Miserable" sound anything but? Those are among the many questions this album inspires. An, um, interesting try, I guess, even if it mostly left me baffled. Oh well; Bitte Orca—the Dirty Projectors album everyone seems to know and love, anyway—is up next.
William Baziotes's The Beach (1955), featured in Whitney Museum of American Arts' Signs & Symbols exhibition
Art
★ Signs & Symbols, seen at Whitney Museum of American Art in New York
★ Oskar Fischinger: Space Light Art—A Film Environment, seen at Whitney Museum of American Art in New York
I found myself with oceans of free time on my hands on Friday afternoon, and since I found myself in the Upper East Side at the time, I decided, on the spur of the moment, to wander over to the Whitney and check out whatever exhibits I had missed since the last time I was there. Mostly, I wanted to catch up with German-American artist Oskar Fischinger's trippy three-screen multimedia projection Space Light Art (1926), which initially caught my interest not so much for its visual qualities as for the snatches of Edgard Varèse's Ionisation I heard coming out of the screening room. Ionisation is actually a fitting piece of background music for Fischinger's work; like Varèse's blast of nonmelodic percussion noise, Space Light Art works on a purely abstract level, blasting its bright colors and ceaselessly reconfiguring geometrical shapes at you in a 10-minute loop. It's a pretty cool experience if you're willing to fully submit yourself to it.
Space Light Art also fits in well with the exhibit right next to the screening room on the second floor, a large-in-scope show entitled Signs & Symbols devoted to showcasing the work of many post-World War II American artists—heavyweights like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Louise Bourgeois, among plenty of others—who dealt with visual abstraction partly in response to the rampant consumerism of the 1950s. But this isn't just another exhibit devoted to Abstract Expressionism; there are also works by other lesser-known American artists that show off a more concrete sensibility—like William Baziotes's ocean landscapes, for instance, or the Asian-language-inspired pictograms in the work of Bradley Walker Tomlin. Regardless of historical context, the exhibit, taken as a whole, is intriguing enough to the eye to sharpen one's awareness of the awesome power of suggestion symbols have in evoking all sorts of different meanings and connections.
I did also spend some time on the third floor checking out this show devoted to a previously unknown-to-me artist named Sharon Hayes. I'm a bit hesitant to say too much about it now, mostly because I feel a repeat visit might be beneficial to my formulating a more completely informed take on her work based on the exhibit. For now, then, all I'll say is that I found her multimedia explorations of the political and the personal to be intellectually intriguing (there are film installations, audio installations, pieces of performance art, photographs and even signs and posters included in this show) and sometimes genuinely poignant, and, based on what I've seen, I'd say it's worth a visit. More details later, I hope.
NEW YORK—All I have to say about Andy Griffith, who died today at the age of 86, is: Many will remember you as Sheriff Andy Taylor and/or as lawyer Ben Matlock on television, but I will always remember you as that folksy demagogue Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes in Elia Kazan's still-scalding media excoriation A Face in the Crowd (1957)
Watch his no-holds-barred madness in this climactic clip, and keep in mind that this was just his first feature film.
I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the passing last week of Andrew Sarris, one of the giants of film criticism. Among his many achievements, he introduced the auteur theory—previously only espoused by Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and other French Cahiers du cinéma critics—to a wider audience, first with his essay "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962," then in his seminal 1968 book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, in which he applied an auteurist way of thinking to American movies, and changed the way a generation of critics thought about film.
That said, I also admit that I find myself with little else to offer beyond that acknowledgment of his immense influence. I encountered The American Cinema fairly late, during college—years after I had already had my way of thinking about film rocked by Sarris's supposed ideological opponent (not really) Pauline Kael. It was Kael, not Sarris, who was my gateway to film criticism, so she will always have a fonder place in my heart than Sarris, to be honest. I say that, however, as merely a statement of fact, not as a way to elevate one critic over the other. To his eternal credit, Sarris was always treating cinema as a living, breathing thing, subject to reconsideration and revision if need be (for instance, he famously changed his mind on 2001: A Space Odyssey, albeit under the influence of drugs, after categorizing Stanley Kubrick as an example of "Strained Seriousness" in The American Cinema). For him, it was always about the films; such an attitude remains as valuable as ever these days
May he rest in peace and continue to be an inspiration to film critics everywhere.
***
I guess this week was just so packed with artistic consumption that I didn't have time to give each item in this log my usual extensive considerations. Nevertheless—and despite the fact that I'm a bit behind in a couple of writing assignments—I tried to give you all.
Guns and Roses(2012, Ning Hao), seen at Walter Reade Theater in New York
★ Wu xia(2011, Peter Chan), seen at home in Brooklyn, N.Y.
★ Monsters Club (2011, Toshiaki Toyoda), seen at home in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Again, you can all look out for my forthcoming House Next Door preview piece for more about these films. By the way: I only discovered after the fact that the 114-minute version of Wu xia that I watched at home is not the same as the 98-minute U.S. version that, according to the Subway Cinema page for it, will be screening at the New York Asian Film Festival on July 9. I hope the 98-minute version doesn't diminish the longer version's considerable strengths.
★ Spaceballs(1987, Mel Brooks), seen at home in Brooklyn, N.Y. [second viewing]
This is for another future House Next Door piece, so you can all read my detailed thoughts on this film then. For now, I'll just say: I found myself laughing quite a lot this time around, even at a lot of its dumber jokes (a bunch of officers named "Asshole"? Really?). Maybe I was just in the right frame of mind for it at the time. (Who knows if that same mood might have led me to be far more charitable to the obnoxious Medieval Play, of which more below?)
Though I wouldn't say that I know Dan Sallitt personally, I have met and conversed with him in person, we have crossed paths many times in New York cinephile circles, and I do know and admire his film criticism quite a bit. So feel free to take this with a grain of salt, but I think his newest film, The Unspeakable Act, is legitimately great, taking a potentially icky premise—the incestuous longing a teenage girl (the astonishing newcomer Tallie Medel) has for his older brother (Sky Hirschkron)—and mining it for sensitive coming-of-age drama instead of mere cheap titillation (don't worry, the girl never actually consummates that longing). The result is as emotionally rich and deeply poignant a cinematic experience as I've seen all year, in addition to being the best of the films I've seen so far at this year's BAMcinemaFest. If this was to get some kind of theatrical release within the next six months, this would surely rank high among my favorite films of the year; it's that good.
Music
★ Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 6(1972/1965, Leonard Bernstein/New York Philharmonic)
Having acquainted myself with Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony a few weeks ago at that Cleveland Orchestra/Franz Welser-Möst concert at Carnegie Hall (which I wrote about in this previous artistic consumption log), I was curious to hear Leonard Bernstein's 1965 recording of the piece, considered one of the classic performances of the work. It is quite good indeed; his most notable interpretive touch arguably comes with the steady tempo he chooses for the second movement, adding a bit more heft to a movement that normally seems trivial coming after the long, tragic opening Largo. Bernstein's idiosyncratically neurotic reading of Shostakovich's First—which remains a startling musical statement for a first symphony—is also worth hearing.
Medieval Play (2012, Kenneth Lonergan)
This deliberately anachronistic burlesque on, among other things, the Great Papal Schism, period stage plays and the impossibility of moral awakenings in a backward society is about one-third witty and two-thirds irritating, with Kenneth Lonergan casting off his usual insight and sensitivity for a self-indulgent mess of gleefully sophomoric jokes and easy historical condescension. Its final, cynical twist of the satirical knife—suggesting the immorality on display has remained constant throughout history—admittedly carries a certain nasty charge, but considering the lowest-common-denominator pandering of its methods, it strikes me as one of those pot-calling-the-kettle-black scenarios. Well, Mr. Lonergan, at least there's always Margaret(getting a home-video release very soon, and well worth your time if you missed it in theaters—which, I imagine, would be most of you dear readers).
...Over the years, critics and others have remarked that I'm interested in the judicial system. Of course I am. Some have said my theater roots show because of the number of plays I've done as movies. Of course they do. There have been a bunch of movies involving parents and children. There have been comedies, some done badly, some better, as well as melodramas and a musical. I've also been accused of being all over the place, of lacking an overwhelming theme that applies to all my work. I don't know if that's true or not. The reason I don't know is that when I open to the first page of a script, I'm a willing captive. I have no preconceived notion that I want the body of my work to be about one particular idea. No script has to fit into an overall theme of my life. I don't have one. Sometimes I'll look back on the work over some years and say to myself, "Oh, that's what I was interested in then."
Whatever I am, whatever the work will amount to, has to come out of my subconscious. I can't approach it cerebrally. Obviously, this is right and correct for me. Each person must approach the problem in whatever way works best for him.
I don't know how to choose work that illuminates what my life is about. I don't know what my life is about and don't examine it. My life will define itself as I live it. The movies will define themselves as I make them. As long as the theme is something I care about at that moment, it's enough for me to start work. Maybe work itself is what my life is about.
And don't get me wrong: The body of work Lumet, the legendary Hollywood director who died at the ripe old age of 86 on Saturday, amassed over the course of his long and fruitful career is certainly a considerable one, in many ways. Me, though, I treasure Lumet not so much for his films (though, of the handful I've seen, I'm wholeheartedly on board with the consensus anointing 12 Angry Men and Dog Day Afternoon masterpieces; Networknot so much), but for his great book Making Movies, from which the above quote is taken, from its first chapter, titled "The Director: The Best Job in the World."
In Making Movies,the veteran filmmaker not only goes into the nooks and crannies of the filmmaking process in a warm, wise and accessible fashion, but also articulates his own philosophies on filmmaking in ways that usefully illuminate his own art. In the book's third chapter, Lumet offers these valuable and somewhat provocative thoughts on "style" in a film:
Making a movie has always been about telling a story. Some movies tell a story and leave you with a feeling. Some tell a story and leave you with a feeling and give you an idea. Some tell a story, leave you with a feeling, give you an idea, and reveal something about yourself and others. And surely the way you tell that story should relate somehow to what that story is.
Because that's what style is: the way you tell a particular story. After the first critical decision ("What's this story about?") comes the second most important decision: "Now that I know what it's about, how shall I tell it?" And this decision will affect every department involved in the movie that is about to be made.
...Critics talk about style as something apart from the movie because they need the style to be obvious. The reason they need it to be obvious is that they don't really see. If the movie looks like a Ford or Coca-Cola commercial, they think that's style. And it is. It's trying to sell you something you don't need and is stylistically geared to that goal....From the huzzahs that greeted [Claude] Lelouch's A Man and a Woman, one would've thought that another Jean Renoir had arrived. A perfectly pleasant bit of romantic fluff was proclaimed "art," because it was so easy to identify as something other than realism. it's not so hard to see the style in Murder on the Orient Express. But almost no critic spotted the stylization in Prince of the City. It's one of the most stylized movies I've ever made. Kurosawa spotted it, though. In one of the most thrilling moments in my professional life, he talked to me about the "beauty" of the camera work as well as of the picture. But he meant beauty in the sense of its organic connection to the material. And this is the connection that, for me, separates true stylists from decorators. The decorators are easy to recognize. That's why critics love them so.
As the quote above suggests, Lumet as a director was all about serving the script as much as possible, adapting one's style to fit the material. Often, he aimed for as invisible a style as possible, as he was always more interested in allowing storytelling and acting, rather than show-offy directorial fireworks, to make the biggest impression. There's a reason why his films are often acclaimed for the high-quality acting and expert storytelling more than for any consistent signatures on Lumet's part. That is not to say he was lacking in vision—though what that vision is, Lumet, as the passage from Making Movies that opened this post suggests, seemed happy to leave to critics to elucidate.
Whether such conscientious craftsmanship is enough for a filmmaker to be considered a great artist is open for debate, and I won't pretend that I value Lumet's work quite the same way I do other filmmakers—I'm thinking of directors like Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, and many others—who managed to carve out arguably more memorable visions within the classical-Hollywood-cinema tradition. Nevertheless, especially these days, with many mainstream Hollywood releases openly flaunting visual incoherence and pandering to the lowest common denominator, Lumet's humble classicism and respect for an audience's intelligence is worth treasuring, especially now that he's gone.
So rest in peace, Mr. Lumet. And if you haven't read his book yet...well, it's a quick and breezy read, but it's also genuinely enlightening, not only about the filmmaking process, but about Lumet himself and where he was coming from as a director. Other than watching some of his films, I can't think of a better way to commemorate his passing.
At least I can say to myself that I did get to see the man in public once before he died, at an event hosted by The Wall Street Journal in the summer of 2009 featuring him, his daughter Jenny (fresh off of having her script for Rachel Getting Marriedfilmed by Jonathan Demme) and the Journal's film critic, Joe Morgenstern. In fact, I wrote about the event for the organization's Speakeasy blog here!
Tura Satana, the cult actress known best for showing off her buxom figure and feminine wiles in attacking all the men who dared objectify her in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!(1965), died Friday night in Reno, Nev.
I hadn't realized, until reading this brief New York Times obituary, that the Japan-born Satana had had a childhood that may well have prepared her to to play the avenging feminine angel Varla in that Russ Meyer exploitation classic. Perhaps she was waiting all her life to let out all that sexual aggression.
Now, I guess, we'll just have to imagine ourselves getting crushed by your stiletto heel from Heaven...or is it Hell?
The passing, due to complications from multiple sclerosis, of the musical and visual artist many in this world knew as Captain Beefheart demands to be acknowledged.
Putting aside his wide diversity of musical influences and the extent of his own influence on later punk-rock and new-wave bands like Talking Heads, Devo and many others, there remains the music: some of the most deliriously experimental, defiantly personal and endlessly fascinating rock ever recorded. When I heard that Van Vliet had died yesterday, I immediately decided to revisit his 1969 classic Trout Mask Replica and found myself once again seduced—yes, seduced—by its challenging Arnold Schoenberg-like dissonances and wild and weird poetry. Even his relatively "accessible" later work—I'm thinking of his last three albums, Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)(1978), Doc at the Radar Station(1980) and Ice Cream for Crow (1982)—suggest gleefully confounding glimpses into one messed-up mind. I mean that as a total compliment, of course; he was a true original, and one can honestly say there hasn't been music quite like his then and now.
For what it's worth, the amusing Twitter feed @Discographies—which bills itself as "a definitive guide to an artist’s body of work (studio albums only) in 140 characters"—summed up Captain Beefheart's music in this way:
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: 1 primitivism; 2 post-impressionism; 3-4,9-11 early & late cubism; 5-6 expressionism; 7-8 LeRoy Neiman.
And finally, some video footage, this of his appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1980 performing two of my favorite Beefheart songs, "Hot Head" and "Ashtray Heart," from Doc at the Radar Station:
As someone who admittedly isn't particularly into following politics with the same zeal as I follow, say, film news, I was surprised to find myself reacting rather intensely to news of the death of former North Carolina senator John Edwards' ex-wife, Elizabeth, at the hands of a breast cancer that she had battled for about a decade.
My stronger-than-expected reaction probably has less to do with any interest in her political and personal life than with the fact that just one day before her death, she had publicly announced that she, upon hearing from doctors that further treatment of her cancer would not make a difference at this point, would stop treatment and basically accept her impending death with as much high spirits as possible. As she said in her statement:
I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful. It isn't possible to put into words the love and gratitude I feel to everyone who has and continues to support and inspire me every day. To you I simply say: you know.
This, keep in mind, was announced just one day before she passed away.
Life just isn't fair sometimes—especially Elizabeth Edwards's life, what with cancer; the death of her son Wade in 1996; and, more recently, the revelations that her husband had not only cheated on her, but fathered a child with the other woman in the process.
Now that I think about it, you know who else suffered such traumas during his lifetime?
That's right: Gustav Mahler did. His firstborn daughter, Maria Anna, died from diphtheria at the mere age of 5 in 1907; soon afterward, he discovered he had an incurable, if not fatal, heart defect; and he then found out that his wife, Alma, was cheating on him (perhaps out of resentment borne out of her husband's banning her from composing her own music so she could focus on child-rearing). One of the major legends surrounding Mahler's Sixth Symphony is that the three hammer blows in its epic finale foretold some of these personal tragedies, even as it was written during a relatively joyful time in his life.
And yet, Mahler endured through these tribulations and went on to produce such later masterpieces as Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony, works in which you can sense his struggles in just about every note. It seems that Elizabeth Edwards found her own way of working through her own tragedies in public: by advising her husband on his senatorial and presidential campaigns; by making health-care reform a great mission of hers (one that eventually bore fruit last year); and basically just by staying politically engaged and active after quitting law in the wake of her son's death. She may have laid bare her private pain on a public stage, but she nevertheless proved to be an inspiration to many with her passion and intelligence.
And now she's gone. Just like that.
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, by the way, has this touching remembrance of Elizabeth Edwards over at The Daily Beast.
To commemorate the death of Leslie Nielsen (from pneumonia complications), the Huffington Post put up this post today recounting some of the more memorable lines uttered by the great comedian/actor from three of his most famous films, Airplane!(1980), The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!(1988) and The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear(1991). Here's the thing, though: None of those lines, as far as I know, were actually written by Nielsen. Others wrote them, and, simply reading them on the page and divorced from context, one might find some of those punchlines, in and of themselves, breathtaking in their cheesiness rather than their wit. Nielsen, however, with his flawless deadpan, made those lines work every single time; even when playing a bumbling Clouseau-esque fool like Frank Drebin in the Naked Gun movies, he never, ever let on that he was in on the joke. He didn't need straight men; in those films, he was his own straight man. Maybe his decades preceding Airplane! basically playing actual straight men in films like Forbidden Planet (1956) and The Poseidon Adventure(1972) gave him the resources to apply that same stalwart quality to his comedic performances.
For a more thorough appreciation of Nielsen's career here, I direct you all to Edward Copeland's fine remembrance at his blog here. In the meantime, I'll just note that, in addition to the kinds of B-grade horror flicks I referred to previously, I grew up on the kind of laffaminit spoofs that Nielsen often appeared in during his late-career comedic renaissance. Seeing Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult(1994) on television (the rare instance, by the way, in which the network-TV version actually included more footage than its theatrical version) offered me my first glimpse of Nielsen, and I don't think I had laughed harder at any other movie comedy up to that point (Airplane! came soon after that). In that sense, he was an essential part of my formative cinephilia—even in lesser stuff like Repossessed(1990), Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) and Wrongfully Accused (1998). Even with those misfires, I thank him.
BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Thanks to some internet-connectivity issues here in my new Crown Heights apartment, I wasn't able to post this in as timely a manner as I would have liked. But better late than never, I suppose.
Following the momentous passing of Eric Rohmer, Chabrol appears to have become the next French New Wave luminary to bite the dust.
Many have remarked upon Chabrol's blistering critique of middle-class repression, and there's certainly something to that, most notably in films like La femme infidèle (1969; later remade by Adrian Lyne in 2002 as Unfaithful) and Le boucher(1970), where his technical precision and ironic detachment suggest twisted desires lurking underneath innocent-looking exteriors. And yet there was always a deeper empathy lurking underneath Chabrol's chilly façade. Like Alfred Hitchcock, Chabrol understood that, whether we'd like to admit it or not, such dark emotions are a part of what makes us all human.
The two aforementioned films are great, but the one film from his 1960s and '70s (the period of his work with which I'm more familiar) that really sticks out to my mind is his 1969 film This Man Must Die, a revenge drama that manages to portray vengeance's destruction of one's soul with the kind of cold humor, emotional/moral complexity and mournful poetry that Chabrol delivered at his best (a height which Chan-wook Park can only dream of reaching). Revenge thrillers seem to be all the rage these days (I've been seeing trailers for yet another big-budget thriller about one man's quest of revenge, a film starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson with the not-terribly-intriguing title Faster), but Chabrol, with unnerving clarity, challenged us to stare down vengeance's moral abyss. That was the kind of challenge Chabrol consistently, masterfully issued in his vast filmography, all the way up to his sharp 2007 black comedy A Girl Cut in Two(which, by the way, I reviewed for The House Next Door here).
His now final feature, Inspector Bellamy, is slated to open in New York on Oct. 29, by the way.
May he rest in peace.
In the meantime, chew on ace video-essayist Kevin B. Lee and film critic Dan Sallitt's insightful take on both La femme infidèle and Le Boucher:
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—A legend of journalism has died.
Obviously, I wasn't alive during Daniel Schorr's journalistic triumphs and controversies—an in-depth report on life under communism in East Germany in 1962, the reading aloud of Richard Nixon's notorious "enemies list" on TV (of which he was one), the trouble he got into by Congress and his network after leaking a secret report on illegal FBI and CIA activities in 1976, among other achievements—as a CBS reporter for more than 20 years. My only exposure to the man was as NPR's senior news analyst. Every time I had the radio turned to either All Things Considered or Weekend Edition I'd always perk up my ears whenever I heard Schorr's wise, grandfatherly manner stream through my radio speakers, talking about the news of the moment with wisdom, passion and refreshing (especially these days) evenhandedness.
Now, no more. A true legend of the field, he will be missed...yes, even by young folks like myself.
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—My friends, I hope you all had a nice, relaxing Memorial Day weekend, while of course remembering all of our fallen soldiers while doing so.
Me, I had to work Sunday and Monday—an "occupational hazard" of working at least partly for The Wall Street Journal's international editions, and in the journalism industry in general—but, after nearly three years of doing so, I'm used to it. But my Friday and Saturday—and to a lesser extent, Sunday—were interesting enough that I figured I'd devote a couple of posts to it.
Buckle up, folks, because I'm about to go all over the place in the next couple of days or so!
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First: as a cinephile, I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the passing of actor/filmmaker Dennis Hopper, who died on Saturday at the age of 74 after a long bout with prostate cancer. If any Hollywood artist can legitimately be considered "legendary," Hopper is most certainly one, with a large, distinctive, richly varied body of work that evinces the kind of restlessness and iconoclasm that demands to be treasured and applauded. You certainly never knew what to expect from Hopper film by film, performance by performance—but whatever he did, he did it with utmost sincerity and commitment, even to failed ends (as with his troubled 1971 film The Last Movie).
I don't claim to have seen every performance and directorial effort of his, but while his Frank Booth in Blue Velvet(1986) is a tour de force of twisted terror; and his hippie photojournalist in Apocalypse Now(1979), from which the screengrab above derives, is vividly whacked-out—among many other memorable pieces of acting, for sure—I'll go ahead and point to his performance in that modern action masterpiece Speed(1994) as a terrific example of the kind of imagination and conviction he could bring to his work. Howard Payne, the antagonist who puts a bomb on a Los Angeles bus that spurs much of the high-intensity action in the film, would probably seem like a standard-issue action-movie villain if you were just reading his lines on a page; Hopper, however, dares to turn screenwriter Graham Yost's lines into something very close to an inspired portrait of a deeply disturbed middle-aged man with a perverse love of bombs and a demented sense of entitlement. He truly makes the role his own—and isn't that one quality that distinguishes great actors from merely serviceable ones?
Just witness the way he turns a soliloquy about the beauty of a bomb into something that sounds genuinely spontaneous and horrifyingly funny (see from 0:37 onward):
Forget John McCain; here was a true maverick. May he rest in peace.
Here's a lengthy video tribute to him, from (who else?) Matt Zoller Seitz over at Moving Image Source (you can see a written introduction to this video here):
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We may remember Dennis Hopper more strongly now in death, but what a remarkable life he lived! Unless you believe in reincarnation or resurrection, death is death; what's left is life and how you've lived it.
(Photo taken by Carol Rosegg)
That, of course, is one of the major themes underpinning Our Town, Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about daily life, love, death and the eternal in an unremarkable small American town. I finally—finally—caught up with this classic Friday evening at New York's Barrow Street Theatre, where director David Cromer's acclaimed off-Broadway production has been playing. Believe the hype, folks; this production is as amazing as you have heard. Breathtakingly intimate—helped considerably by the theater's tight, small performance space—and soulfully performed, the production fully brings Wilder's formally daring and profoundly moving text to vivid life.
Our Town isn't what you'd consider an "uplifting" drama, to say the least. Its final act takes place in a metaphysical afterlife where deceased characters reflect on their own individual lives and on the nature of existence: how people live, how they choose to live, and how they choose to remember their lives. And it ends on a note that reminds us of humanity's insignificance in the grand scheme of things. Wilder isn't presenting a comforting perspective here, and its overarching metatheatrical conceit—a Stage Manager presides over the play as a God-like figure, offering thematic counterpoint to the scenes enacted by the cast and occasionally interacting with actors and audience members—only adds to the discomfort.
But Our Town, for all its bleakness and sadness, ends up being cathartic rather than merely tragic. As with any great work of art, it's the clarity and beauty with which Wilder expresses his point of view that makes it genuinely exhilarating as much as it is "depressing."
I don't think I've ever had as consistently electrifying and deeply affecting a theatrical experience as on Friday night. Go see it, if you haven't. Who knows? It may well be one of those life-changers.
Side note: With his focus on a theatrical figure and its equally ambitious exploration of life and death, I have to imagine that Charlie Kaufman had Our Town at least partially in mind when he conceived of Synecdoche, New York. Has anyone else made such a connection in considering Kaufman's great magnum opus?
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Coming in Part II: I sat through Matthew Barney's entire Cremaster cycle at IFC Center and lived to tell you all about it—right before Our Town! Plus, a less-than-positive Sunday evening. It has something to do with my car. Yes, again.
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—It looks like I just naturally pick the really nasty inclement-weather days to trek out to New York.
Before Saturday, I had heard all the warnings about heavy rain and wind possibly causing flooding on the roadways. But who would have expected that all that heavy rain and wind would not only cause flooding, but would also knock out power not only throughout half of East Brunswick (and elsewhere, of course), but also throughout the NJ Transit train system, thus forcing the whole damn system to shut down for hours on end? Seriously, who predicted all that?
Naturally, yesterday was the day I picked to goto the Museum of Modern Art to finally see Jia Zhang-ke's Platform(2000) on the big screen!
A replay of that towed-car disaster in mid-December during that big blizzard? Thankfully, it wasn't quite that bad...but it was still pretty bad.
The trouble started after Platform's final credits finished rolling. I turned on my cell phone and got hit with two text messages: one from a friend I had met up with earlier in the day for lunch texting me to alert me to problems with NJ Transit, and the other from NJ Transit itself saying service on various rail lines, including the Northeast Corridor (my line, duh), was temporarily suspended "due to signal problems." Another NJ Transit epic fail? But then I discovered that someone had left a voicemail in addition to these two texts. The voice message turned out to be my mother informing me that the power was totally out not only at home, but throughout parts of East Brunswick, including many traffic lights.
Needless to say, this didn't sound like a simple NJ Transit epic fail after all...
After getting stuck in the MTA subways for a longer-than-expected time thanks to another power-outage problem, I finally returned to a frenzied Penn Station to discover that alas, Northeast Corridor trains were still not running at all. How the hell am I gonna get home?, I wondered in a momentary panic.
Then I remembered that there was a Suburban Coach bus line that departs from Port Authority Bus Terminal and stops, among other places, in downtown New Brunswick, close to where my car was parked. So I took a subway up to Port Authority and discovered, thankfully, that that particular bus line was still running. My excitement dimmed when I finally got up to the departing gate and saw a massive line for this one bus. Of course, I had to get home, so what other choice did I have except to stand on my own two feet and wait as long as I needed to wait in order to catch one of these buses? Even if that meant forgoing dinner altogether in order to ensure my place on that line.
I eventually did get on a bus, though it took a little over an hour of waiting to do so. That lengthy wait, of course, was surely preferable to waiting for a seemingly endless amount of hours at Penn Station for train service (which, according to an alert I got this morning, only finally got restored at around 7 a.m. Sunday). But tell that to my stiff legs! (I woke up Sunday morning feeling that stiffness big time; I had to put some Bengay on an area on my left leg to curb that stiff feeling.)
Being that this was rain and not snow, I got back to New Brunswick—with Rt. 27 unusually dark thanks to street lights having the power knocked out of them—and thankfully saw my car intact and, above all, untowed. So I rode back home to the eerie sight of Rt. 18 more or less completely dark thanks to the power outage. But my adventure back to 4 Oliver Ct. was not over yet.
Because of the non-functioning traffic lights, intersections were blocked off by cones—a problem for me, because I have to cross an intersection in order to get from one side of Rt. 18 to the other to get to my house. I thought of another route to take, but yet another blocked-off portion on a certain road on that route threw me off. More momentary panic ensued: What the hell was I going to do now? (Believe it or not, even though I've lived in East Brunswick for over 18 years, I still don't know it enough to be able to summon up a mental map of the whole city.)
I guess I got lucky: Somehow, after wandering for a few minutes around some residential roadways, I eventually found my way to the other side of that blocked-off portion of Summerhill Road and navigated my way back home. (Whew! So at least the parts of East Brunswick of which I can summon up a mental map eventually did help me out.)
And, when I finally got back home, the power was still out at my house...including our router, which meant no Internet access for me except via my cell phone, which itself was already on the verge of losing battery life, thus limiting my usage. Is this how it felt like living in the Dark Ages—with only candles providing illumination? (As I jokingly tweeted through my phone last night: "Where's John Alcott when you need him?"—Alcott being the cinematographer who got such sumptuous images out of mere candlelight for Stanley Kubrick in his 1975 masterpiece Barry Lyndon. On Twitter, Jim Emerson—he of the always illuminating Scanners film blog—responded to this tweet saying, "Sorry, you're in Gordon Willis world." Oh, in my house, it was probably even darker than what the cinematographer for the Godfather films wrought from low light!)
All in all: It took maybe two hours longer and more agita than usual, but I eventually got home from New York safe and reasonably sound, without having to force my long-suffering parents to drive out to pick me up somewhere. But man...what a storm! The results of it were still being seen Sunday morning, when I had to drive through heavily flooded areas of Rt. 18 to get to New Brunswick in order to get to work. Even on my way home from work on Sunday evening, parts of Rt. 18 northbound were still closed off. (This better not seriously impact my commute this morning!)
But once again, bad weather almost always seem to turn commutes back home into an adventure for me. (Yeah I know, it's moving time already.) Beware the ides of March indeed!
The burning question through all of this is: Was seeing Platform on a big screen ultimately worth all the hassle? Ultimately, I say yes. For one thing, the ending of the film, which left me rather indifferent to the whole on DVD, is even more devastating than I remember. I've increasingly began to marvel at just how different a big-screen movie experience can be compared to a home-video one. But then, that might not be anything new to most people. In any case, I will have more to say about this (and The World) in a future post.
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For now, I'd just like to toss off a quick recommendation for a film that begins a five-day run at the Museum of Modern Art today that I saw and was quite dazzled by at last year's New York Film Festival.
The film is called Ghost Town. No, it's not that David Koepp supernatural romantic comedy/drama with Ricky Gervais and Téa Leoni (though I do highly recommend that film as well). It's an immersive three-hour documentary from Chinese filmmaker Zhao Dayong that digs into the nooks and crannies of Zhiziluo, a town in China's Yunnan province that was once an important town to the Communist Party, but which has been abandoned by the government and essentially left to fend for itself. With utmost patience, curiosity and attention to detail, Zhao follows various characters in this town, spanning the generations, as they try to negotiate living in this desolate town, seemingly cut off from anything we might recognize as the modern world. It's perhaps a bit too sprawling, and some of the personal stories Zhao chronicles are more interesting than others (its second hour does sag a bit). But the film is so eye-opening and generously humanistic that the film, warts and all, engages the heart and the mind even through the occasional longueurs of its 169-minute running time. Ghost Town is a uniquely affecting epic about people who carry forward in the face of gradual disintegration. China may not care about a town like this anymore, but, for the people in Zhiziluo, they persist with their lives and traditions; they quite possibly know of no other choice.
If you have the time to devote to this rewarding tapestry, I strongly urge you to do so. (See MoMA screening info here.)
Here's a trailer for the film:
Also, for a bit of context regarding Zhao himself, here's an interesting New York Times article about him and other Chinese "guerrilla filmmakers," published on the eve of the film's lone New York Film Festival screening in late September.
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And finally: Peter Graves has died at the age of 83.
I don't really know his work, whether on "Mission: Impossible" or elsewhere, well enough to be able to offer any meaningful remembrance. Honestly, to me, he'll always be Captain Clarence Oveur from Airplane! (1980), the guy who most famously says to a young kid in the film, "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?"
...and now J.D. Salinger has died??? So many artists who spoke to me at certain points in my life, all dying within a relatively concentrated period of time? Damn...
In the interest of honoring Salinger's distrust of "phonies," I might as well disclose early on that, other than The Catcher in the Rye, I haven't yet read much of Salinger's other work. (I guess I know now what will be next in my reading queue after I finish Farber on Film!) In fact, it was only after his death was announced today that I finally got around to reading his famous short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"...and, in addition to being a deeply affecting piece of writing (its ending is as blunt-force stunning as the impact of the bullet that Seymour empties into his brain), it vividly reminded me of what I loved about Catcher when I acquainted myself with it during my high school years.
I like to think that one of my better qualities is that I always try to be honest with people, both in person and online, about the kind of person I am; I think The Catcher in the Rye played a huge part in shaping that quality in me. Also—to be perfectly honest—it spoke profoundly to some of the darker emotions I was feeling during my adolescent years, as someone who always felt rather outside of the loop in many ways, particularly socially. Admittedly, I haven't re-read the book in years, and even after reading "Bananafish" tonight, I do wonder, years removed from those emotionally tumultuous high-school years, if I'd embrace it with nearly the same passion that I did back when I was younger. (In the back of my mind, I wonder if Salinger's vision, casting as it does a gleaming light on the innocence of childhood, has begun to come off as merely sentimental as I wade deeper into adulthood. Or have I really become that cynical? I shudder at the latter notion.) But I won't deny the impact The Catcher in the Rye had on me...and I can't imagine its brilliance simply as a piece of writing has dimmed one iota over the years.
And now, I will end this remembrance here, reserving to right to say more about Salinger once I get to the rest of his work. Nevertheless, I thought this particular loss, and my own personal (if perhaps not wholly well-informed) investment in said loss, was still worth noting here.
Howard Zinn, the great American historian and political activist, has died.
His epochal People's History of the United Statesremains an important work in my life, not only in profoundly influencing the way I look at American history, politics and politicians, but also providing inspiration simply as a work of tremendous curiosity and bravery. Zinn perceived mainstream U.S. history as, for the most part, "written by the winners," so to speak, and thus proceeded to look into alternate voices—ranging from minorities (Native American, African American, etc.) and women, to laborers and even prisoners—to recount history from the viewpoints of the oppressed and unfairly treated. The result is a genuinely revelatory work of rigorous research and humane empathy, one that asks all of us to always consider our fellow man while cultivating a healthy skepticism toward our government (because, believe it or not, our government officials, democratically elected or not, may not always, and quite possibly rarely do, have our best interests in mind).
There are few books that I have read (and few movies that I have seen, for that matter) that I can say has stirred in me an honest-to-God desire to try to go and bring out some kind of change in the world I live in. Zinn's People's History of the United States is one of them. May his passion for championing the rights of the downtrodden continue to reverberate in all of us even after his death.