Jim Jarmusch: 'Stranger Than Paradise' (1984)

Jim Jarmusch: Stranger Than Paradise (1984) -- same year as the Coen Brothers' first movie, Blood Simple.

Stranger Than Paradise, made on a shoestring budget, is all verve and imagination, a lovely film. 

There are really only four substantive characters in it, all related by Hungarian blood or American friendship: Willie (John Lurie), his cousin Eva (Eszter Balint), their aunt Lotte (Cecillia Stark) and Willie's pal Eddie (Richard Edson). And one key song: "You Put a Spell on Me" by Screamin' Jay Hawkins. All but Aunt Lotte are in movement -- New York City, Cleveland, Florida. Jarmusch employs fades between scenes, and it's shot entirely in black and white film -- elements that one will not forget. 

Stranger Than Paradise may very well be the "freshest" of all of Jim Jarmusch's films, though Gimme Danger (2016), his recent documentary on Iggy and the Stooges, is "fresh" in its own way. 

Can you dig? I love seeing such perspectives on things, what Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) dubbed --  -- one hundred and one years ago -- defamilarization. Seeing ordinary seeming people and things anew, those and that which we've become "used to" -- or tired of -- with "refreshed eyes" -- and a renewed magical sense of possibility.   

Today's Rune: Strength. 

Dan Trachtenberg: '10 Cloverfield Lane' (2016)

Jack be nimble,

Jack be quick.

Jack jumped over

The candlestick.

Jack jumped high,

Jack jumped low,

Jack jumped over

And burned his toe.

Dan Trachtenberg's 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) buzzes along with Mary Elizabeth Winstead as protagonist and John Goodman as antagonist in a cool, intelligent indie-style film, just my cup of coffee. Situated somewhere in the same universe as those crazy tales from the Coen Brothers as well as that of The Americans, Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul, the first season of True Detective and even Twin Peaks, it considers the kaleidoscopic possibilities of good, evil and also, from a human perspective, dimensions that may be indecipherable. 

"Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you." (The Big Lebowski). 

10 Cloverfield Lane has more than a passing connection to the Coen Brothers: Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars in the latest season of Fargo and John Goodman has appeared in five Coen films (six including his voice as an announcer).

There is a distinction in magnitude between premeditated mass evil, seemingly random evil, and situational evil. However, for anyone on the receiving end of evil (or even just a hungry bear), these distinctions may be moot. The key is in how one responds -- having to make existential choices, large or small, in the face of it. See Flannery O'Connor for more on that score. In all such cases, this is compelling stuff.

Today's Rune: Protection.  

Akira Kurosawa: 'The Bad Sleep Well' / 悪い奴ほどよく眠る (1960)

In The Bad Sleep Well / 悪い奴ほどよく眠る (1960), Akira Kurosawa tackles a still very contemporary theme: institutional greed and corruption, cover-up. and behind-the-scenes machinations.

Shot in black and white (with elements of silent films -- like special emphasis on faces and gestures), the movie's basic set-up is thus: Nishi (Toshiro Mifune) plans to take revenge on his corporate father's tormentors. 

The film is developed in waves, with a grand wedding, reporters asking questions, corruption investigations, and much unspooling intrigue. 

The Bad Sleep Well twists along to include an attempted suicide at the mouth of a (real) live volcano, clandestine night meetings, and semi-hostages secreted in the ruins of a (real) munitions factory bombed by the Allies during World War II.  

Admirers of Alfred Hitchcock and the Coen brothers will especially dig this production. 

Those even barely attuned to what's going on today, from Trumpian America to Brazil to South Korea, from Fukushima Japan to around the globe, will surely grok the enduring connections across time and space between egotistical organizational chess pieces bound up in graft, greed and sheer folly, so well-depicted in this film.

The Criterion Collection includes added bonus materials with its DVDs, including a relevant chunk of Akira Kurosawa: It is Wonderful to Create (2002). 

Today's Rune: Harvest.

Milwaukee, Minnesota (2003)

If you approach Allan Mindel's Milwaukee, Minnesota (2003) as part archetypal fairy tale, part darkly comic modern "heartland" story, you can relax into it without qualm. Definitely this is true: twelve years since its release and three viewings down the pike, I continue to enjoy it -- a small independent film that holds up well. 

Besides the handful of actors (all with something to recommend in their performances), there are striking visual contrasts (as in the image above) within the purview of Bernd Heinl, director of photography, and for the ears, there's a cool wintry soundtrack by Michael Convertino and Robert Muzingo (even a little backwards-looping music). 

Milwaukee, Minnesota centers around Albert (last name Burroughs, no less, played by Tory Garity, whose mother is no less than Jane Fonda), a savant of some kind, wildly successful at winning ice fishing contests while living with his control-freak mother. 

Who, you may ask, is Albert's father? There's a little mystery for you right off the bat. 

Why, suddenly, does Jerry James, a roving incarnation of evil (banality and all) -- arriving from Chicago as if escaped from a parallel Coen brothers' universe, convincingly played by Randy Quaid -- roll into town?  

Why on earth is the movie called Milwaukee, Minnesota, and who is Mr. McNally (played aptly by Bruce Dern) -- as in the publisher of maps?

Why is Gary (Josh Brolin) wearing modified women's undergarments? What exactly is Gary's connection to "the Lady" (played by Holly Woodlawn, as in "Holly came from Miami F-L-A / Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.")?

What about grifter Tuey (Alison Folland) and her hypochondriac brother Stan (Hank Harris)?  Hint: how Tuey and Albert respond to one another is a key element in the film.

Milwaukee, Minnesota, in its overall feel, reminds me of Wim Wenders' 1977 film Der Amerikanische Freund / The American Friend (that one starring Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz). And at certain times, Troy Garity's Albert strongly resembles Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock, protagonist in The Graduate (1967). In addition to a certain physical resemblance, Hoffman was ten years older than his character was supposed to be at the time of filming, and both actors were about thirty years old when playing their respective roles -- in both cases they are memorable and a little off-kilter.
  
Today's Rune: Harvest.

The Eyes of Texas: T Bone Burnett at the Lone Star Film Festival (2010)

In remembering that T Bone Burnett had brought up Marshall McLuhan during the 2010 Lone Star Film Festival in November, 2010, I dug up my notes from his talks. Saw him at three different venues on or around November 13, 2010. These scribbles were made during T Bone's interview with Bobbie Wygant. 

T Bone has worked on many projects, ranging from his own albums to the music for Coen Brothers' films (The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Inside Llewyn Davis) to Walk the Line and Crazy Heart.

Bobbie Wygant asked T-Bone about his inspirations while living in Fort Worth, Texas.

There was a place called the Capri Theatre and they showed [Luis] Buñuel films and [Jean-Luc] Godard films and [Federico] Fellini films and [Sergei] Eisenstein and [Akiro] Kurosawa . . . these incredible foreign films in Fort Worth, Texas, & it was like a portal into another universe . . . I appreciated it so much. I learned. I would say it was through these two places, the Capri Theatre and Record Town, that I sort of learned everything I've lived my whole life on.

[My 2015 update]: The Capri (which also went by other names) was torn down I think in the 1980s. Nothing has replaced it. Fort Worth needs independent "art house" theatres -- at least one, for God's sake. Fort Worth's three major art museums are wonderful resources, and "Magnolia at the Modern" screens independent and international movies on weekends. However, new art does better in less controlled, contained or restricted environments; that is, via more free-wheeling & Bohemian focal points.

At another venue in 2010, T Bone Burnett spoke of his agreement with Marshall McLuhan, that a new medium envelopes an old medium and lifts elements of the old medium into higher art forms.

Examples: TV becomes more engaging when eclipsed by the internet (The Sopranos, etc.); analog music (vinyl record technology) becomes more absorbing when made obsolescent by digital music. 

Let's be mindful that we are surrounded by an electronic envelope of many layers. 

There's more, but that's a taste of it.

Today's Rune: The Self. 

Paul Thomas Anderson: 'Inherent Vice' (2014)

Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice (2014), an adaptation of the 2009 Thomas Pynchon novel of the same title, is a milieu film set in 1970 Los Angeles, California, and thereabouts. Ronald Reagan is the governor, Richard M. Nixon is the president and the US-Vietnam War is still dragging on and on.  Hippies and squares vie for shrinking karmic space on the West Coast.  

As Doc Sportello, stoner private eye, Joaquin Phoenix fits right in, as does Doc's frenemy, the other key character in this tale, flattoped LA Detective Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin). 

Inherent Vice: it's the ouija board, man! Obvious comparison points: the Coen Brothers, The Big Lebowski (1998) and A Serious Man (2009); Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974); and so on. 

Inherent Vice: It's the fog, man!  Anderson proceeds at his usual grinding, discomfiting pace. Not as evil here as in There Will Be Blood (2007) or The Master (2012), still there are in Inherent Vice scenes both long and slow -- even unnerving. Overall, it's not as "heavy" a trip as the aforesaid flicks, not by a long shot -- which is a merciful thing. 

Inherent Vice: Can you grok this, 1-Adam-12? 

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Behold a Pale Horse: Take II

I. Fred Zinnemann's Behold a Pale Horse (1964) -- continued.

There are aspects of this obliquely plotted film that remind me of the Coen Brothers (compare 2007's No Country for Old Men, for instance).

At one point in the movie, I expected the main protagonist to swoop in like James Bond or a Clint Eastwood character, having everything figured out - but no! 

At another point, I projected an easy ending like that of Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006) -- but no! 

II. Lourdes. Insert Catholicism and "magical thinking." 

Not only is this a key element in Behold a Pale Horse, but here, too, an important aspect of the Spanish Civil War is evoked. The unwieldy coalition fighting against Franco's Nationalists to preserve the Republic included anarchist elements that turned violently on people of the cloth. The number of priests and nuns murdered during the war came to about 7,000, if memory serves. A blot on the Republican side that might have been avoided through more skillful efforts at winning over priests and nuns rather than killing them.

III. Civil Wars and Memory.

The inclusion of a padre as a major character in the midst of fratricidal conflict reminds me very much of The Fratricides, a novel about the Greek Civil War (1946-1949) by Nikos Kazantzakis published in English in 1964 (translated by Athena Gianakas Dallas). Kazantzakis, better known perhaps for Zorba the  Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, covers some of the same issues as seen in Behold a Pale Horse -- a film which is itself based on Emeric Pressburger's 1961 novel, Killing a Mouse on Sunday.

The thing about civil wars is -- every inhabited place seems to have to endure at least one of them, they are vicious, and most notably -- they never seem to come to complete resolution or reckoning in memory or history. Civil wars go on and on for decades and centuries, morphing into other outlets that oftentimes include renewed flashes of violence.

Take the American Civil War (1861-1865) -- there are people living in the USA today who say they would join the Confederacy even now. Why? Because slavery was abolished? Because they claim the right of individual states to decide whether something like slavery -- or anything else at all -- should be abolished or changed, rather than a national government? That's what they say in the 21st century.

Take the Greek Civil War. The average Greek (if there is such a person) seems to wonder now, what was it about? What was the point of all that viciousness in the late 1940s, even after WWII? "I don't know. It's confusing." 

And finally for now, take the Spanish Civil War. What if, instead of bloody violence, calmer people had worked out a compromise, helped foster the working classes and living conditions for most people in general rather than prop up mostly the rich and powerful, what if Spanish society had evolved a rational separation of Church and State, offered something hopeful to all elements of that society? What might have happened over time is what is happening over time, despite the civil war, and despite economic setbacks. And so, what was the point of all the death and destruction?  Ask Spanish people today, see what they say. 

What do you say?

Today's Rune: Harvest/Signals. 

Coen Brothers: Inside Llewyn Davis

Seeing Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), it's 1961, okay? All across the USA . . . It's set mostly in NYC, Chicago and along the road in between. 

I really like this film, and it'll take a while to absorb. Kind of trippy, kind of existential, kind of like a mythical tale, with realism, magical. On the road between the cities in snow and at night -- these scenes were mesmerizing. And along came Dylan. Can you dig?

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 
   

Jean-Pierre Melville: Le Samouraï (Take I)

Watch carefully and you may be blown away by Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï (1967). In the memorable dreamscape of this noir masterpiece, Alain Delon rocks the house stealthily. 

As with several of Melville's movies, you can "see" the continuity in filmmaking history, from American gangster sagas and crime dramas before and offerings by, say, David Lynch, the Coen Brothers, Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino afterward. And in keeping with Melville's experience in the underground during World War II, again there's only a matter of degree in differentiating the types of operational tactics used by police and criminal, organized or otherwise. 

In Le Samouraï, the police employ all sorts of surveillance and interrogation techniques, while criminals use evasive maneuvers and stonewalling to avoid lockup or death. This near-equivalency comes by direct comparison: while Costello (the hitman played by Delon) uses a large set of special keys to steal cars, police use a large set of special keys to break into and enter Costello's apartment to plant a bug. 

As is often the case with Melville, Le Samouraï showcases a dazzling effort that works the mind and senses subliminally as well as superficially.

Today's Rune: Signals.     

Jill Sprecher: 13 Conversations About One Thing

Jill Sprecher's Thirteen / 13 Conversations About One Thing (2001) dovetails nicely with the work of existentialist writers like Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus and Hanna Arendt. On the one hand, we can do certain things, make certain choices; on the other, we take our chances anytime we wake up and get moving. Besides that, there's an uncertain amount of randomness and entropy at play in the universe.

A snippet of the Roxy Music song "Editions of You" (1973) covers the gist of it:

They say love's a gamble, hard to win, easy lose
And while sun shines you'd better make hay
So if life is your table and fate is the wheel
Then let the chips fall where they may
In modern times the modern way . . .

And the rejoinder:

Love me, leave me
Do what you will
Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

When somebody came a knockin' at her door, Dorothy Parker would occasionally mutter, "What fresh hell can this be?"

In any case, the film makes clear that kindness is rarely a bad thing, certainly preferable to cruelty, violence or indifference. As Tennessee Williams put it, attention must be paid.  

 

Thirteen Conversations About One Thing is not a documentary. It's a dramatic film structured around statements made by characters, unspooled in nonlinear form. The disjointed structure invites a second look, once the basic contours of the storyline are better understood. 

 

The one thing?  That state of being/perceiving called Happiness.

 

Jill and her sister Karen Sprecher have here woven together a meditative, sometimes brooding film, but physical events do occur, significant ones in the lives of the characters played by heavy hitter actors, including Alan Arkin and Clea DuVall (both now in Argo), Amy Irving, Matthew McConaughey and John Turturro. The last named reminds me that Thirteen Conversatons has a similar sort of take on life as the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man (2009).

 

Today's Rune: Joy.   

Killing Them Softly: The Ghost of Calvin Coolidge

OK, so with Killing Them Softly (2012) we have Andrew Dominik's variation on a George V. Higgins novel. It's sort of a dark satire of "Hard Times on Wall Street," 2008 version. Gangsters, hoodlums and Lumpenproletariat are hard up, too. One guy tries to steal back a small cash tip and is berated by an associate. Another (played by James Gandolfini) refuses to tip a hooker even a dime. Another (Richard Jenkins' character) announces that due to "Recession prices," a contract killing is now worth $10,000, not $15,000.

Ensemble acting is good and there are some memorable, compelling scenes. The pacing is a half beat behind just about anything made by the Coen Brothers, the dialogue not as snappy, but it's interesting. Some of the seedier characters are truly loathsome, but there's still some semblance of a code being maintained in the neighborhood -- which is probably more than you could say about Wall Street at the time.    

In the background, Panama Jack McCain and Barrack Obama battle for the presidency. In the foreground, Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) makes quips that sound like a variation on the Coen Brothers through the mouth of Calvin Coolidge.

Blood Simple (1984):  "Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else . . . that's the theory, anyway. But what I know . . . is Texas, an' down here . . . you're on your own.

Killing Them Softly (2012): "I'm living in America, and in America you're on your own."

US President "Silent Cal" Coolidge (January 17, 1925): "The chief business of the American people is business."

Killing Them Softly (2012):  "America's not a country. It's just a business. Now fuckin' pay me." 

Ha!

Today's Rune: Wholeness.   

Chinese Whispers: Big Bird in Exile?

All day after last night's presidential election debate, stories and jokes about Sesame Street have been bouncing around the cybersphere. It's sort of like the old game of "Chinese Whispers," also known as "Telephone" or, as its surrealistic cousin is called, "Exquisite Corpse." Even people on the street are talking about it. "Poor Oscar the Grouch," one guy quipped. "He's already living in a trash can; if Romney won he'd be totally homeless." Ha! What next, Big Bird in Exile?

Here's what started millions of cyberbubbles zipping around the world -- Mitt Romney's statement (on October 3, 2012), in Denver:  "I'm sorry, Jim. I'm going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I'm going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you too. But I'm not going to — I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it. That's number one."

This was Romney's only specific budget cut proposal during the debate. 



Beyond Sesame Street, there's China and Chinese people. One of the last things I ever took notice of about Big Bird prior to last night was a special called Big Bird in China (1983), something that seems all the more apt today. Nowadays, the economies of the USA and People's Republic of China are intextricably linked. But even so, China and Chinese have down the centuries been convenient scapegoats for various and sundry. It's almost hard to believe, but even in the 20th century a lot of Americans still referred to any Chinese person as a "Chinaman" -- and that was the more "polite" epithet. This fact is wickedly lampooned in the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski (1998). Walter Sobchak (John Goodman): "The Chinaman is not the issue here, Dude. I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you do not . . . Also, Dude, Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please." And there's the matter of "some Chinaman" in the Korean War.

A quick perusal of stories that include the word "Chinaman" in the headlines of that hoary American newspaper of record -- the New York Times -- reveals a lot about what constituted "acceptable language" and widespread attitudes in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

November 22, 1884: "A CHINAMAN A CHINAMAN ALWAYS." This discusses the legal status of one Ah Kee, born in Hong Kong. ". . . Judge Brown held that a Chinaman was a Chinaman, no matter where he was born or where he lived. A Chinaman could never lose his nationality . . ."

October 2, 1885: "A CHINAMAN STRIKES BACK." This was an incident reported from Bismarck, "Dakota:" a "slightly intoxicated" man named Thurston "passed a Chinaman who was sitting in front of his laundry. Turning around, Thurston slapped the Chinaman in the face, saying: 'What the ____ are you doing here?' The Chinaman sprang to his feet, knocked Thurston into the street, and would have killed him if he had not been pulled off."

September 15, 1888. "HE WAS A GOOD CHINAMAN. AND HE TRIED TO BE JUST AS GOOD A CHRISTIAN."  

One Lo Ye reportedly died of a heart condition during a Sunday school session. "He had given up his habit of worshipping brazen images and material representations in hideous forms of beneficent heathen gods, and intended to become as good a Christian as soon as possible . . ."  Afterwards, "scores of Mongolians came to the chapel to gaze upon the feautures of the dead. With impressively sad countenances, they came, gazed in silence for a moment, and then with even more sorrowful faces went away."

October 18, 1888: "A CHINAMAN IS A CHINAMAN." (Sequel to 1884 story above).

July 8, 1904: 'CHINAMAN ROUTS ITALIAN. With Hot Iron and Water He Resents Attack on His Queue."

One John Trepori, "an Italian," reportedly was harassing one Lang Ung "at 36 North Fourth Avenue." A stiletto was involved,  and then a pistol. As things went from bad to worse, Trepori "drew a revolver . . . and fired point blank at the chattering Chinaman," who was not seriously injured. Both men, however, were arrested.

July 28, 1907: "AGAPE AT CHINAMAN'S WIFE. White Woman Lectured Harlem Mob Which Threw Things -- Police Called."  This story revolves around one "Wo Lee, Chinaman, at 1329 Amsterdam Avenue . . . near 125th Street." A woman identifying herself as Mrs. Wo Lee reportedly asked a gathering crowd, "Didn't you ever see a white woman married to a Chinaman before? I am sure you must have. Why, I have even known white women to marry
negroes . . . Please go away now."

And so on. Today's syndicated news outlets are slightly more subtle in revealing many such biases and prejudices, yet they're still quite outrageous when you investigate closely. Can you imagine looking at 2012 from the perspective of a hundred years from now? 

As for Big Bird and Sesame Street, in November I'm voting for Barack Obama again -- just as I did in 2008. Even a hundred years from now, I suspect, my voting record will stand proudly. 

Today's Rune: Joy.

Sergei Prokofiev: Alexander Nevsky

Sergei Prokofiev scored Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938) in a way that strengthens and enhances the film. He synchronized each passage to fit a particular scene's mood and context. The Teutonic Knights and their "religious" collaborators are given a sinister theme, while the people of Rus rally to a more folksy and mystical aural backdrop. This not particularly subtle pattern has been repeated in numerous other movies ever since, to varying degrees of effectiveness. Here it works.

Off the top of my head, I can think of several scores that inextricably tie film with soundtrack as with Prokofiev's for Alexander Nevsky: in that when one thinks of a certain film, the associated music is also recalled, and when the music soundtrack is heard out of context, one immediately summons memories of its cinematic source.

For instance: David Lynch's Blue Velvet (Angelo Badalamenti, 1986); Mike Nichols' The Graduate (Dave Grusin, Simon & Garfunkel, 1967); the Sergio Leone epics (Ennio Morricone); the James Bond theme (Monty Norman) and also the title songs for most of the 007 series; Woody Allen's Manhattan (George Gershwin selections, 1979). Let me not forget several works by the Coen Brothers, plus Werner Herzog.  

Cable TV series have been underscoring the importance of music selections and soundtracks for quite a while, HBO and its rivals included. Their music archivists and editors have done impressive and sometimes quite subtle synchronization to enhance mood and meaning.

Now, dear reader, aside from musicals and music documentaries, what are some of your favorite movie soundtracks?

Today's Rune: Defense.      

El Río Bravo del Norte

There's nothing quite like seeing things up close. Dispenses with political theatrics and propaganda distortions, for one. At this Brownsville-Matamoros crossing point, El Río Bravo del Norte (the Rio Grande) is nowhere near as formidable as the Detroit River at the US-Canadian border. Here there's a lot of foot traffic, which makes the border crossing feel intimately human in scale. More like Detroit-Windsor is the crossing at Laredo-Nuevo Laredo, with its long lines of 18-wheelers and aggressively intrusive inspections. Here, no problem, really.


The International Bridge: where both Route 77 and the USA begin (going north from Tamaulipas) and end (going south from Texas). That's the ground leading into Heroica Matamoros across the river. Matamoros has about half a million inhabitants; Brownsville proper has just under 200,000.  

The Great Wall of America, I suppose, except there's a big hole in it that we walked through to see the river up close. No one stopped us, no one cared. No one said anything, in fact. Behind all the smoke and hype from far away mouths, Brownsville is almost entirely a Latino-Hispanic city, far more so than during the Mexican-American War -- which started here in 1846. Longterm cultural survival and demographic realities have trumped many of the early results of that particular military-political conflict. People, as they have for a long time, cross back and forth, buy things and do stuff, and then they go home until the next time around.  

 

Porfirio Díaz resided here in 1875, biding his time to become ruler of Mexico in the late 1870s and from 1884 until he was forced into exile in 1911 by the Mexican Revolution. This complex, resembling a Spanish governor's palace in, say, San Antonio, New Orleans or Santa Fe, dates to 1850.

Downtown Brownsville at night has a different feel than during the day. On this visit, by day it was filled with pedestrians, by night, mostly people in cars, trucks and SUVs, with a few tavernas open for business and most shops closed.  

Lost?  You might wait around a spell and see what happens, but I'd keep going down the road to see what's over the horizon -- one can never be sure if you're sittin' dead in the water. As old Visser quips in the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple (1984): ". . . what I know about is Texas, an' down here... you're on your own."  In this case, it's a back road leading to Resaca de la Palma -- the World Birding Center, not the battleground.

Today's Rune: Defense.   

Sullivan's Travels

Preston Sturgis' Sullivan's Travels (1941) has a lot to recommend, and more to consider. Veronica Lake ("The Girl"), in her late teens, has a sophisticated vibe that belies her youth. Joel McCrea, later known for his role in Westerns, plays John L. Sullivan, a financially secure but naive movie director who wants to make a film about the "forgotten man" during the Great Depression, O Brother Where Art Thou? In order to do this, he must step away from Hollywood and roam the American countryside like a "hobo." This character arc is akin to the arc in Herman Hesse's Siddhartha (1922), however without as much depth.

Sullivan picks up "The Girl" while ordering coffee on the road, or rather she picks him up through an act of kindness. Subsequently, there is train-hopping, food-sharing, and much contrast between the life of the rich and the poor. And, remarkably for the time, there's an acknowledgement of race without it being entirely transformed into a stereotypical farce.    

Sullivan's Travels is at its best in the final half hour or so, when Sullivan finds himself on a prison farm, isolated from his Hollywood support team and entourage. The scenes with Veronica Lake are also good, but somewhat restrained, thanks to the prudish Hollywood Code that had put a damper on sexual realism since the early 1930s. This particular movie has to dance around the realization that Sullivan, when he's roaming around with The Girl, is joylessly married to another woman who eventually "hooks up" with his business manager (who are seen together, but in separate beds); of course, "The Girl" wants to be with Sullivan, but first he must divorce the shrewish current wife (who's only in it for the money, apparently) and then marry her. Meanwhile, Sullivan comes to the conclusion that laughter is the Balm of Gilead enjoyed by rich and poor alike, to hell with gender issues. (So: as long as people are laughing, socio-economic and gender-based imbalances can be safely swept under the rug?).

Final note: I don't know if this was intentional or just a coincidence, but the name John L. Sullivan hearkens back to "Manifest Destiny," a phrase coined in the 19th century by John L. O'Sullivan. 

Today's Rune: The Warrior.   

Dominique Deruddere: Everybody's Famous!

The story in Dominique Deruddere's Everybody's Famous! / Iedereen beroemd! (2000) is like a melding of John Waters and the Coen Brothers, only gentler and more Flemish. It ruminates on public adulation of and desire for celebrity status, but is more concerned with humanizing social relationships. In a light but engaging way, Everybody's Famous! works in the manner of several other successful independent films -- modestly.

Jean, a struggling sad-faced middle-aged father (played consummately by Belgian actor Jesse De Pauw) hates the dreary factory job where he's worked for more than half of his life; he is also a musical composer who dreams of seeing his seventeen year old singer-daughter Marva (Eva van der Gucht) become a star using music he writes for her; but his relationship with Marva and his wife Chantal is rocky at best.

Things take a wild turn when Jean is laid off. Out of a chance encounter and economic desperation, he kidnaps a pop diva and everything goes haywire. Where the Coen brothers would go sinister here, Deruddere proceeds, more like John Waters, playfully forward, commenting on celebrity and wealth along the way.  Much hay is slyly made of mirrors and masks, such as when Jean meets the pop diva's comically smarmy manager wearing a bizarre Michael Jackson mask, until the manager reveals that he already knows Jean's "real life" identity: he can take off the mask. Everybody's Famous! is also notable in its use of mobile phones as an essential plot device -- "way back" near the turn of the century.

Today's Rune: Movement.       

Coen Brothers: True Grit, Part 2

The trope of retribution in True Grit also runs through Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West / C'era una volta il West (1968), which, along with Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly / Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966), presents the most powerful vision of the American West ever put on film. True Grit is a strong American Western, but Leone's films carry universal weight, a gravitas no doubt carried over from surviving as a boy -- at the receiving end -- through fascism and the Second World War. Unlike someone like John Wayne, Sergio Leone (1929-1989) had the advantage of operating with a critical distance between himself and the American political landscape, a landscape through which American-made Western movies must inevitably travel to be made. Besides which, John Wayne was a true believer in simple black and white distinctions between good people (flag-waving, saber-flashing Americans) and evil people (everyone else).

In True Grit, Rooster Cogburn is the living epitome of Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), if Jackson had been born fifty or sixty years after his actual birth, and if instead of president of the USA, he'd become a US Marshal. Cogburn and Jackson's quixotic code of honor is identical or nearly so; they both "know they are right," and do whatever it takes to see things through their way. They are fearless, headstrong, talented, chauvinist and a bit crazy; neither distances nor obstacles can stop them. But they do pay a heavy physical price for their movements and style, and they do have flashes of doubt. Fourteen-year old Mattie Ross has some of the same obstinate, relentless and occasionally doubting qualities, but she in True Grit aims for a supremely direct retributive act, a one-time deal; yet she, too, pays for that single-mindedness in more ways than one. Be careful what you wish for.

One thing is certain about Andrew Jackson and the main characters depicted in the Coen brothers' True Grit or a Sergio Leone film: you probably wouldn't want to cross paths with any of them on a bad day.       

Today's Rune: Harvest.

Coen Brothers: True Grit, Part 1

Mattie Ross: "Well, I’m sorry that you are paid piecework not on wages, and that you have been eluded the winter long by a halfwit."

The Coen Brothers' recent version of Charles Portis' novel True Grit (1968) is a real treat, and it's made a ton of money. End of story.

That stated, I'd like to take a passing glance at two of several aspects of the film that are compelling. The story is set in and around Fort Smith, Arkansas, and the Choctaw Nation in eastern Oklahoma, in the late 1870s (i.e. smack between Deadwood and Hang 'Em High).

1. Economic exchange: The entire story is rife with exchanges. Not only are people paid for goods and services with gold or paper currency, there are other deals made, including by barter. Most of these exhanges involve negotiation and bargaining, and sometimes on the idea that a certain offer may be the final one. One example: Mattie and Rooser cut a hanged men down from a tall tree in Choctaw country. A rider approaches (apparently Choctaw), makes a deal with Rooster and rides off with the body;  said rider fires a shot to warn Rooster of the approach of another rider (part of his deal with Rooster). Next rider appears carrying the same body of the hanged man, which he retrieved from the first rider in exchange for some small goods.  Second rider offers to trade the body back to Rooster, having already extracted the dead man's teeth. And so on.

2. Morality, Ethics, and Codes of Social Behavior: Malum prohibitum (Illegal by way of changeable law or custom) and malum in se (Evil in and of itself, regardless of law).  

One man, about to be hanged in Fort Smith along with two other men by order of the Hangin' Judge (Isaac Parker, a real historical figure), notes in his final words that he'd not be hanging that day if he'd a'killed the man he'd intended to. And he is correct: compare his plight with that of Marshal Rooster Cogburn, who is sanctioned by law, and who therefore can kill with virtual impunity (same as soldiers in wartime, within certain stated limits). Cogburn has killed dozens of men under variable circumstances, the details of which, for the most part, we'll never know. However, he admits to having robbed a bank, to boot.

Malum prohibitum and malum in se are literally discussed by Mattie, who is fourteen, and LaBoeuf, the Texas Ranger.  

Examples of malum prohibitum: blue laws. Selling liquor on a Sunday. Smoking Cuban segars (cigars) in the USA in 2011 (illegal), as opposed to in 1911 (legal). Selling beer on a Friday in 1929 (illegal) versus in 2011 (legal). Consensual sex between adults, regardless of marital status (legal in 2011 in parts of the USA, but technically prohibited in other parts). A gift of money (legal) vs. an open exchange of money for sex  (prostitution = illegal, except where it's legal). Marrying across "race" (illegal in much of the USA before 1967, legal throughout the USA since 1967). In sum, some laws are dumber than others, and some evils are more truly evil than others. Some perceived social evils are not in fact evil at all, and some things not touched by laws of the day may actually be evil.

In the next post, a little comparison with Sergio Leone's vision of the American West.    

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.