Some Came Running

Kouples kounseling Kool-Aid: I drink it up

I wish I could be somewhat less predictable but alas the day has come when I join thousands of other white heterosexual film reviewers of a certain age and say nice things about Richard Linklater's Before Midnight, in my review for MSN Movies. The extent to which I am being sarcastic when I commend it as a good date movie is up to you to decide. For the record, I haven't believed in "date movies" since I took Debra B. to see Eraserhead at a midnight show at the 3rd Street Playhouse (now the IFC Center) in late 1979 and she said it reminded her that she had to do her laundry. If you're interested in a dissenting voice on the Linklater, Richard Brody duzn't like it and he don't mind telling you.

I also review Epic, which wasn't good. 

Did Julien Temple invent Baz Luhrmann?

Patsy Kensit attempting to make an anthem of a song called "Having It All" in Temple's Absolute Beginners.

I have to admit I was kind of disappointed with my level of disappointment with Baz Luhrmann's film of The Great Gatsby. At least one other critic of my acquaintance has noted that as summer movies go, it's the one that's the most fun to argue about, but I'm not much inclined to join said fun, just because I don't feel all that strongly about this Gatsby. While A.O. Scott avers that the movie is "eminently enjoyable," and good for him, I found it a bit of a slog, although when I cite its slogginess I take care to make it clear that I'm in now real way offended by what Luhrmann "does" with or to the book; as much as I was unengaged, I wasn't affronted either. If anything, I found the enterprise, for all its mammoth-ness, kind of tired. Flappers dancing to Jay-Z did not excite my sense of sacrilege at all; indeed, I found that and other such showbiz fillips as the movie offered entirely expected.

Now when Luhrmann had the cheek to put "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in Moulin Rouge, and have it bellowed by Jim Broadbent, that was my idea of purposeful, almost revelatory sacrilege, and a reminder that an anti-showbiz protest is in fact an irreplaceable staple of showbiz. The anachronisms of Gatsby don't just tell us what we already know, they make points that unduly flatter us, as we intone sentences about how the materialism of the so-called Jazz Age is echoed in today's hip-hop fueled madness for "bling," and man, I just lost a little bit of the will to live merely typing that. The more people have been talking about Gatsby, the less I've been inclined to think about Gatsby. Instead, my thought turn to Julien Temple, about ten years Luhrmann's senior, and I think, why isn't HE allowed to make these sorts of movies anymore. By "these sorts of movies" you might think I mean, yeah, Baz Luhrmann movies, that is, gargantuan-budgeted lavish real-or-quasi-musicals—and think how genuinely sacreligious Gatsby would have been as a real musical, with its lead character, say, rapping about how good it felt to be, well, him; how queasily exhilarating the picture could have been if Luhrmann had risked that sort of ridiculousness and made it pay off—that take years in the gestation and production. Not quite, I'd answer. But in thinking, or not thinking, about Gatsby I also got to really thinking about Absolute Beginners, the musical Temple, a punk-weaned filmmaker who assembled a Sex Pistols feature of sorts before moving to music videos, made in 1986, quite some time before Luhrmann's film debut, Strictly Ballroom. The picture was poorly recieved at the time it came out. Looking at it now, it seems practically prophetic of the whole Luhrmann aesthetic, albeit with some interesting differences—none of which really explain why Temple's career in doing this sort of thing faltered, while Luhrmann's took off. That's not to say that Absolute Beginners is anything like a perfect film, but in terms of its conception and overall "attitude" it's remarkably and often giddily free. Adapted from a Colin MacInnes novel of social upheaval in '50s London, it stays true to its source in its fashion (e.g., a sense of social consciousness/conscience) while exercising a colorful fluidity in most other respects. I looked at it the other day and thought it held up pretty well; not only that, all the things that critics of its day gave it a hard time for—established pop songs lip-synched by the actors/characters within the diegisis, a purposeful carelessness in coloring outside the lines of its ostensible period, and more—are now regarded as, depending on the critic,  entirely acceptable devices (particularly when Luhrmann uses them), or no big deal. It's true that Temple doesn't nose around the vicinity of Camp as much as Luhrmann does, and that the relentless Brit-centricness of Absolute Beginners' content might have been as much of a roadblock to its making a wide impact as its formal playfulness was...but all things considered I have to say that Beginners qualifies as a movie that was genuinely ahead of its time, and that Luhrmann came along with an ethos that flirted with the postmodern even as it gave up big fat heartfelt melodramatic frissons in a superelaborate package just when mass audiences were ready for it. Temple's subsequent Earth Girls Are Easy is also way better than its reputation suggests, but doesn't function as well for my case because it's more overtly frivolous. 

These days Temple mostly gets to make imaginative, knowledgable documentaries about music and musicians, but his last fiction feature, 2000's Pandaemonium, which sort of makes rock stars of Wordworth and Coleridge, albeit not in a stupid way, showed that he's still in possession of the technical chops and the perspective to make cheekily new the things audiences have become accustomed to thinking of as old. It rather makes one regret that the only filmmaker today with permission to make Baz Luhrmann movies is, well, Baz Luhrmann. 

Green blood, Jim

Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine in Star Trek Into Darkness, for which I wrote a largely spoiler-free (although apparently the thing these days is to drop spoilers, and to care passionately, or something) review for MSN Movies. I liked it!

Also: I confirm my status as a member of a spider web of Noah Baumbach confreres who share his warped Manhattan/Brooklyn boho-bourgeoisie values by giving a positive review to Frances Ha. So sue me. 

New avenues in De Niro research: Grace Hightower's coffee

So. I've submitted the manuscript of Anatomy of an Actor: Robert De Niro to the editors at the book publishing arm of Cahiers du Cinema. The book is part of a series (Karina Longworth's consideration of Al Pacino is out soon, and Longworth has started a Tumblr devoted to the book; I might do same myself, or something, when the time is appropriate and I Oh Christ do I have to think about it right now) that's pretty strictly formatted: General introduction, essays on ten films that encompass the whole of the performer's career until now, outro (or "Conclusion"), ten sidebars, and supplemental materials such as biographical chornology, filmography, and footnotes footnotes footnotes. But of course in writing about the ten individual films one does contextualize by discussing other movies, and so in the short time I had to write the book I ended up extremely immersed in the man's work. Thank God for Amazon Instant Video, and by the way, Ivan Passer's Born To Win is actually worth your time if you haven't seen it already. After a little bit I started developing a slight resentment. Then I began to feel like Steve Brody in the Looney Tune Bowery Bugs, at the point when he fails to put two and two together on discovery that all of his tormentors throughout the cartoon have been Bugs Bunny in various disguises. "Everybody's turning into rabbits!" he laments before diving off the Brooklyn Bridge. Substitute "De Niro" for "rabbits" and you get where I was coming from. I won't go into the details of a dream I had in which an appendage...well, as I said, I won't go into the details. 

The book doesn't mention De Niro's personal life all that much, which was good for me given that the two De Niro biographies I worked with were highly problematic anyway; when I started this project I learned that my pal Shawn Levy is working on a proper De Niro bio, and I regret it wasn't available to me as it would have been an excellent resource. (See Shawn's superb bio of Jerry Lewis and you'll understand what I'm saying.) But given the extent to which certain of De Niro's career decisions have been affected by changes in his personal life, and by his increased visibility as a public person, and so on, some things are discussed. I'm not sure if I necessarily would have made room for a mention of the below discovery had I made it before finishing the book. Said discovery occured at the Court Street branch of Union Market, a grocery much favored by the Young And Awful Parents Of Gen-X-and-Y Driven Bourgeois Brooklyn. What can I tell you? It stocks a lot of good, albeit pricey, stuff, and it generally plays vintage Blue Note fare on its sound system, which is nice. (And sometimes, as when the "free" section of Herbie Hancock's "Survival of the Fittest" came up on  one Sunday morning, this music makes the Young And Awful Parents Of Bourgeois Brooklyn a little uncomfortable, and they're not sure whether admitting to their discomfort will make them seem unhip, and their psychic gyrations in this respect are a wonder to behold. Unless I'm just projecting. I could be.) It was in the coffee section. New among the offerings of Stumptown and Peet's and all these new concerns whose rubber-stamped-logos-on-plain-brown-paper-bags contain beans as costly as gold I saw a shiny deep purple package and on closer inspection discerned it was a product from Mrs. Robert De Niro. 

You wanna talk pricey? $12.99 for a 10-ounce bag. But I bought it. How could I not. 

Let's get into the coffee first. On opening, one encounters a pretty nice looking bunch of beans. I took a picture of those, too. 

I threw said beans in the Krups burr grinder and brewed up a big pot for myself and My Lovely Wife. 

It's pretty fruity," My Lovely Wife observed. Whenever I hear anyone say "fruity," I think of Mrs. Bates protesting to Norman about being displaced from her bedroom, but I let it go quick and— agreed—it did have a ripe but acidic sweetness to it. "Do you prefer the African bean or the South American bean?" My Lovely Wife asked. I had to admit that as much of a coffee connoisseur, I mean HOPELESS AND ABJECT COFFEE ADDICT as I am, I hadn't given the matter much consideration before. I guess when it comes right down to it I DO prefer the South American. The best cup of coffee I've experienced in recent years was from a Honduran bean harvested by Those Fucking Hippies at Ritual Coffee. Scarfed it down in San Francisco, brought home a bag, haven't been able to find another since. As it happens I'm not crazy about the fruitiness for which African coffees are renowned; I prefer something a little more robust. Although I'm extremely partial to the Tanzanian peaberry. I contain multitudes, clearly.

Anyway, none of this is to say that the coffee from the Rwandan bean that's the signature of Hightower's brand was bad. It's highly flavorful—complex, as the reviewers like to say. I could totally see it, personally, as a dessert coffee, if I was back on dessert. 

The other salient feature of the Grace Hightower/Coffees of Rwanda brand brings us back to the packaging. Which is shiny and has a weird design (I don't think that extended ampersand really works, frankly) and features a shit ton of copy. On one side there's copy that begins, "There is a place called Rwanda." On the other side a couple of paragraphs signed "Grace Hightower De Niro," beginning "We believe that doing good business means doing good for the communities in which we work." On the back, a sticker that, in this case, tells the story of Buf Café founder Epiphanie Mukashyaka; below that, on the package itself, an explanation of the "Signature Series."  If all this copy doesn't keep you engaged while the coffee brews, or if you want to learn more (and my feeling is that the people behind the product are going for the latter) there is of course a website for you. 

I don't point this out to make fun. It's pretty clear this business idea emerged from a philanthropic impulse on Hightower's part, and a laudable philanthropic interest at that. What's interesting is the way that this enterprise so neatly slots into the contemporary Way Of Doing Things. Anyone who's tried to get a business off the ground or publish a book or do something along such lines is invariably told that regardless of how strong your idea might be, it cannot be launched without a PLATFORM. A celebrity, or the wife of a celebrity, or the partner in a celebrity marriage that has already established its philanthropic bona fides, already has, it is universally acknowledged, a viable platform. Once that's established, the individual with the platform will be told that he or she needs to construct a narrative. This is regardless of whether the venture is charitable or profit-driven; narrative is all, even if it's made up. In Hightower's case, the possible narratives have deep roots in recent history and of course the chosen narrative is the one that is all about hope. One that also, here, tends to assuage non-climate-change-related concerns about the ethics of coffee consumption. At least until the contrarian perspective on that starts coming into vogue, as it may be. (I read a headline somewhere the other day about how "foodies" were actually morally reprehensible, or something, but you know I almost never have been able to hear or read the word "foodie" without throwing up so I skipped the actual article.) Until then, if you're looking for a fruity and complex coffee that supports a growth industry in a particularly fraught part of Africa, I give Grace Hightower's brand a thumb's up.

"Daisy, I'm cured!"

Either that or "One-Two-Three Green Light." These are the jokes, folk. My review of The Great Gatsby, for MSN Movies. 

Ray Harryhausen, 1920-2013

From Harryhausen's unfinished Evolution of the World, late '30s to 1940. Featured on the indispensible DVD set Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection.

I cannot speak for everyone who fell in love with the movies at an early age. Still, it stands to reason that what enchanted us about movies in our tender years had little to do with the way that cinema could convey psychological nuance, or even necessarily how distinctively it could convey a story. No, what got us hooked, I think, was the movies' ability to show us things we'd never seen before, things we might have dimly imagined, or hoped, or dreaded seeing, but never actually laid eyes upon. The land of Oz. The sun going down on Tara. A twenty or, back in the day, forty-foot high snow globe. The Frankenstein Monster. An—impossible!—invisible man. 

Ray Harryhausen himself would have been happy to tell you that it was the sight of a giant ape traversing and wreaking havoc on the streets of contemporary Manhattan that not only made him love movies but set him on his life's path. King Kong was the movie. Harryhausen was in his early teens when he first saw it. About fifteen years later, Harryhausen would work on the effects for Mighty Joe Young.

Harryhausen, Forrest J. Ackerman, and Ray Bradbury reconvene at L.A.'s Clifton's Cafeteria for a featurette for the Early Years DVD.

It is fascinating that Harryhausen's two closest childhood friends, Forrest J. Ackerman and Ray Bradbury, would themselves become ambassadors of the fantastic in the realms of magazines and literature respectively. The triumverate had an incalcuable impact on the pop imagination. What Harryhausen did with clay and plastic and a stop motion camera still constitutes the most dazzling and awe-inspiring body of visual effects a single filmmaker can lay claim to. Even once you knew the rudiments of how stop motion animation was done, what Harryhausen accomplished was unfathomable. The combination of his deep understanding of the frightening and the grotesque (as intuited via the Greek myths from which he drew so much inspiration), and his painstaking draftsmanship, and his literally saintly patience yielded cinematic miracles. The lack of a certain kind of seamlessness in the films that bear his work is in itself seductive, exhilarating. Watching Jason and the Argonauts, the introduction in a scene of a particular kind of visual degradation, the then-unavoidable result of matte work, is exciting, because it's a signal, a cue: an indication that some kind of mind-blowing effects sequence is about to begin. And then the skeletons start swordfighting with Jason and his men, and the consciousness of the matte work goes away; the action is brilliantly choreographed and completely mind-blowing, because you are convinced. Even if you intellectually know that these images are the result of one man making near microscopic movements on a miniature model and taking a still shot of each one, and keep reminding yourself of that, you can't not believe that you are watching living skeletons swordfighting. They're the stuff of nightmares, as are the harpies who torture Phineas in that picture; and yet there'a also a guiltily giggly kick to watching these demonic manifestations. Just as the alien craft demolishing the Jefferson Memorial and more in Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers nails the ecstasy of destruction in a precise, painstaking way that subsequent hypertrophied derivations such as Independence Day never, ever could, not just because of the differences in technology but because of a lack of genuine personal investment. Harryhausen understood the things that we secretly wanted to see and made them happen with his hands and his fingers and his lights and his camera. He was the not-so-secret sharer of every kid who ever skipped his or her homework  over the course of a week and instead spent the time getting that Aurora model of the Forgotten Prisoner of Castlemare assembled just right. And we knew his name because Forrest J. Ackerman told us about him in Famous Monsters magazine, and because Ray Bradbury wrote "The Fog Horn," and because Bradbury's  friend the other Ray took the minimally (albeit beautifully) described monster of Bradbury's story and made him into The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. 

It's so easy to bring to mind the formidability of his creations that one may momentarily forget their wit. Recall the giant not-quite-chicken of Mysterious Island. (And delight in the fairy tales collected on the self-published Early Years DVD collection.) And let's not forget the humanity of Mr. Joseph Young himself, Harryhausen's tribute to the pathos that his master Willis O'Brien brought to both Kong and the son of Kong. Harryhausen lived a rich, long life, and he left a magnificent record of it for his fans, including a remarkable book (An Animated Life), in which the detailings of how he made his incredible visions only enhances their impact when the movies themselves are re-viewed. 

My friend Joseph Failla will be contributing some reminiscences and thoughts later. 

UPDATE: From the February 2004 issue of Premiere, Joseph Failla's review of the DVDs of Beast, The Valley of Gwangi, and The Black Scorpion. Joe presented the issue to Harryhausen in person at a Lincoln Center event that year. 

The Movies: Watching the onscreen legacy of student and mentor can be a rewarding experience; when that student is genius animator Ray Harryhausen (Jason and the Argonauts) and his mentor the great Willis O'Brien (King Kong), the event becomes extraordinary. That's precisely what's offered with the releases of these three fine examples of the art of stop-motion animation in the giant-monster-and-mass-mayhem-movie-tradition. One comes away with the sensation of seeing life's creation on screen, rather than it's destruction - no matter how dark the fantasy turns. 

With Beast (1953), Harryhausen ushers in the first of the atomic monsters in what is his answer of sorts to Kong, the film that changed the course of his life. In this case it's the Rhedosaurus, a dinosaur more than a 100 million years old, released from it's Arctic hibernation by a military blast, that makes it's way through the ocean currents to it's natural stomping grounds- downtown Manhattan! Based in part on Ray Bradbury's short story "The Fog Horn", it's pretty much the blueprint for the monster cycle that would dominate the scene for the next decade or so.

The Black Scorpion (1957) has O'Brien calling the special-effects shots. While it tells the familiar story of giant arachnids running amuck through modern day Mexico, it unexpectedly unleashes the most nightmarish model work seen in the entire genre (one could believe these slimy spiders, worms, etc. had crawled out of the infamous pit on Kong's Skull Island). Topping Them! with its primal fear factor and looking forward to the battlegrounds of Starship Troopers, Scorpion is a rare example of the genre running headlong into the horrific imaginations of it's creators, with spectacular results. This trio comes full circle with The Valley of Gwangi (1969), Harryhausen's loving tribute to O'Brien- a production of one of the master's unrealized project's.  Again referring back to Kong (or Mighty Joe Young) with more than mere suggestion, Gwangi is another tale of adventurers bringing back their monstrous quarry to civilization for fun and profit. Only this time the worlds of cowboys and dinosaurs are melded into a kind of prehistoric rodeo show. The genres play together better than expected; after all, it's one big fantasy designed to cater to one's childlike instincts, although there's nothing juvenile about it. 

The dinosaur effects on display this time are some of the most exciting and complicated yet seen: These "big lizards" have personality and actually give performances, which separates this from much of the advanced techno work achieved today. It took the creation of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy—with the help of an actor and a team of computer artists—to equal the results that Harryhausen and O'Brien got on their own. 

The Discs: In an appropriate move on Warner's part, each film is accompanied with extras that enrich the viewer's perception of its art. Beast offers recollections of longtime pals Harryhausen and Bradbury (whom you never saw so disarmingly delightful) expressing their joy at still being kids at heart and at the thrill that only comes from a lifelong love affair with the fantastic. Gwangi brings us testimony and accolades from some of today's technical wizards, whose works would be unthinkable without these pioneering animators.

And here's Failla's review of The Early Years, from the May 2005 Premiere, headlined "Everybody Loves Raymond:"

The formative years in the career of an artist is laid out before us in RAY HARRYHAUSEN: THE EARLY YEARS COLLECTION (Sparkhill, $29.95), the missing piece of a creative picture that, besides providing delight in and of itself, helps illuminate the better-known work of the legendary stop-motion animator. While Harryhausen is best known for his stunning visions in the likes of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and Jason and the Argonauts, these animated shorts, educational films, and unfinished dream projects show us for the first time the progressive process by which Harryhausen was able to feed his imagination into our own. 

This two-disc set presents the archived work (all in excellent, restored condition) that started his long career. Beginning with the Mother Goose Stories series and several Fairy Tale shorts (originally produced for screenings in schools in the late '40s and early '50s), Harryhausen combines his unmistakably proficient animation skills with child-friendly storytelling. Uncannily, the viewer is drawn to the lifelike qualities Harryhausen imbues his characters with, as well as the ever expanding fantasy world they inhabit. Of these, it's The Tortoise & the Hare that most will regard as the crown jewel of these treasures. By far the most ambitious, this short was discarded, incomplete for many years. Fortunately, with the help of a new generation of stop-motion specialists, Harryhausen was recently able to "finish" the film. The results are a seamless flow of old and new footage with Harryhausen's spirit running through each frame. 

Digging deeper into the disc's many pleasures, we come across some of Harryhausen's most intriguing prospects in the form of experimental tests and fragments. His very early dinosaur footage is painstakingly detailed in the manner of his future mentor Willis O'Brien's work on King Kong. Harryhausen's Elementals (a giant batlike creature's attack on Paris!) sticks in the mind among the various scintillating remnants as an unfortunate missed opportunity. Still, all of it is great to see now.  

Peter Jackson and James Cameron are among those stepping up in the second disc to acknowledge their debts to Harryhausen. What makes all this so special is that he himself is still around, not only to appreciate the tributes, but to explain in his own words his long journey from inquisitive youth with a single-frame camera, to the most revered figure in special-effects history. His continuing enthusiasm is exquisitely conveyed in a reunion segment with Harryhausen and his longtime pals Ray Bradbury and Forrest J. Ackerman as the three relate tales of a lifelong friendship bonded in a mutual love of fantasy and fiction. To hear the famous trio speak as if they were kids once more is not only moving but what this disc is all about. 

"Iron Man 3" and "Kiss of the Damned"

I wasn't all that crazy about Iron Man 3, but my friend Tom Carson really liked it. I point this out not because it's so rare that Tom and I disagree—we disagree, at times avidly, about a lot of stuff. What I did find interesting is that, if you look at both reviews (of which Tom's is the better and more tightly written),  you don't get that "did those two even see the same movie?" sense of disconnect. It's pretty clear we did see the same movie, and came to some of the same conclusions about it. It's more that for Tom the interesting stuff wasn't overwhelmed by the bombast, while for me the bombast wiped all the interesting stuff away. Tom's response to the movie remained enthusiastic through the bombast, to the extent that he was better able to take in what it was signifying, whereas my unconscious inclination was to stop giving the movie the benefit of a doubt at every turn that pissed me off. I don't know if seeing it in a different frame of mind, or maybe from a different seat, would have made a difference. 

Also, I was maybe a little kinder to Xan Cassavetes' Jean Rollin rip Kiss of the Damned than I might have been, had I not been a Rollin fan to begin with myself. I suppose maybe I ought to be crankier about the fact that a taste for Rollin was once regarded as a psychological anomaly, and is now apparently an emblem of exquisite hipster connoisseurship. I might take it up with my therapist, except she'll have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about. 

"Greetings From Tim Buckley"

Penn Badgely and Imogen Poots

I have a rather amusing, I guess, conflict that made it questionable for me to write about this movie in a professional context, which is that a very dear friend of mine in real life is portrayed as a character therein. Frank Wood, a stage actor of good repute, portrays the musician Gary Lucas, who I got palsy pal-sy with after reviewing a show of his in the late 1980s, God help me. I was not present at the Arts At St. Ann's concert that provides this fictionalization of a crucial point in the life of the late Jeff Buckley its climax, but I certainly knew about it, and I was around Gary and Buckley a bit during the latter's brief tenure in Gary's still-extant banc Gods and Monsters. Dan Algrant's movie juxtaposes scenes from the purposefully rootless life of Jeff Buckley's legendary cult-musician father Tim Buckley against a depiction of Jeff's trip from California to New York at the behest of the St. Ann's concert's organizers. 

Movies about the broken bonds between fathers and sons are getting to be a thing with filmmakers of a certain generation nowadays, and Greetings From Tim Buckley is a rare one in that it didn't make me want to puke blood. In fact it is quite good, and one reason it's quite good, in my book, is something I've seen other critics give it a hard time about. The movie is content to let its characters breathe in their environments, and do what they do, and it never attempts to hammer a nail on which to hang their motivations. Which isn't to say it doesn't give you dots to connect. But I was actually fairly relieved, say, that the Tim Buckley depicted in this film (and nicely played by Ben Rosenfield) is never obliged to sit down and deliver a speech about why he's an absentee dad to his infant son. The character's behavior in an early scene, in which he detours into the desert on a road trip to a gig he's likely to be very late for as a result, does a pretty good job of encapsulating the restlessness that guided not just his behavior but his music. Similarly, the quiet exasperation that Penn Badgely's Jeff conveys as everyone he meets in New York immediately tells him how much he looks like his dad and then ignores him is quiet, full of impliction. Hints are dropped here and there by other characters about the kind of music Jeff had been involved with in California, and its disconnection from the spacey, jazz-inflected folk that his dad pioneered; but the feelings of alienation and eventual resolution are conveyed via the spaces the characters inhabit, and the spaces between them. In the vision concocted by Algrant with his co-screenwriters, David Brendel and Emma Sheanshang, confronting and then embracing the shadow cast by his father becomes Jeff's way of finally stepping out from under it. The character's conflicts get summed up pithily; while Jeff insists he can sing rings around his dad, there's also the fact that at the age Jeff was when he turned up for the St. Ann's concert, Tim had made some of his best and most enduring music. 

Once these points are established, Algrant takes his time. Imogen Poots' concertmasters' helper character initially threatens Manic Pixie Dream Girl-hood, but her moody tentativeness gives her a dimension that plays well off of Jeff's what-am-I-doing-here suspension. Wood's version of Lucas is that of a bluff show-me-what-you-got pro who turns quasi-mentor. There's a neat bit where Lucas mentions to Buckley that he should put a lick he just sang "into one of your dad's songs" and Lucas registers the young singer's discomfort; and the scene in which Gary plays Jeff the instrumental that would become "Grace" is one of the better depictions of musical communication I've ever seen in any movie. 

I haven't been crazy about Algrant's other pictures (and I suppose it bears disclosing that the director and myself both acted in the same film a few years ago, although we've never properly met), so I was kind of unprepared for the spare and genuinely poetic feel of Greetings From Tim Buckley. And its ballsy but not ostentatious bucking of standard biopic tropes. I was really taken with it; I think it's one of the outstanding movies of the year so far.

Now, does it depict how stuff really "went down?" I couldn't tell you entirely, and even if I could, the answer would still likely be "Yes and no."  I was talking to Gary about it and I asked him, "You weren't rocking the hat back then, were you?" Like myself a connoisseur of hair loss, Gary in recent years has made a borsalino part of his presentation, but no, during his collaboration with Jeff he was going au naturel. Also, Gary in real life was a lot more immediately impressed with Jeff. As for myself, I thought Jeff was a great singer—how could you not—but in my admitedly rather limited interactions with him, I also found him a bit of a jerk, for lack of a better word. Once he embraced the fact that he was gonna be the most charismatic guy in the room 999 time out of a thousand, he embraced it with a vengeance, let's say. In any event it doesn't matter; Algrant has taken the real life bits, including a lot of wonderful music, and created a story of his own that's smart, engaging, and unexpectedly resonant. You should see it. 

Deanna Durbin, 1920-2013

The great Durbin in Robert Siodmak's 1944 masterwork Christmas Holiday, which I wrote about at greater length here. 

Like Garbo, like Brigitte Helm, not quite like Luise Rainer (who is over 100 and still walks among us), Durbin retired and stayed retired; her abandonment of showbiz is the linchpin of a wickedly amusing (and unsourced) anecdote the late Gore Vidal relates in his memoir Palimpsest: "Deanna Durbin [was] a child soprano and competitor of Judy Garland, whose imitations of her rival were marvelously cruel, invoking a crooked arm and a radiant mad smile to match luminous crossed eyes. But Garland could be equally mordant about herself. When she had made her triumphant comeback at the Palladium in London, inspired by merry schadenfreude, she rang her now-forgotten rival. After many delays and false starts, Garland got the sleepy, ill-tempered Durbin at home in the French countryside. 'Tonight I had the greatest audience of my life!' At length, Judy recounted her triumph. Finally, out of breath, she stopped. There was a long silence. Then a pitying voice said: 'Are you still in that asshole business?'"

Literary interlude

But Professor Skizzen had noticed that God was always excused. Any and every God. For any and every thing. A tornado might trash a trailer park and the poor wretches who survived would think to thank him for sparing them, as well as preserving a children's plate and one photo of the family grinning at the Falls asif they'd pushed the water over by themselves. 

Perhaps the Gods alternated fucking off. "I won't interfere with the destruction of the temple, if you won't prevent the crucifixion of the Savior." The pagans, the Christians, and the Muslims had taken turns burning the Library of Alexandria, but it was a moment of rare cooperation. Most of the time the celestial bodies were at one another's throats. The thought of burning drove Joseph to his attic where there was nothing but paper, sticky strings of clippings, rows of books, piles of magazines, stacks of newsprint, rolls of placards and posters, so he was always frightened by any word that implied ignition. The fact that burning had occurred to him was significant. Set those mountains of painful testimony ablaze, shred the evidence, erase the stories: of the young woman who was raped by her judges in punishment of the adultery of her brother, for instance. Out of what dark corner of the human mind...? or is it all dark, even in the light? or do our murderous desires lie hidden in the closet of the entry? under the runner unrolled down the hall? or disguised as that spot under the dining table where the rug is stained? By whom are we ruled if not by our nature? Remove all signs of those murderers who now make movies of themselves going through their grisly motions; and there will remain the badgering of sweet maids by their horny masters or the drowning of babies in their baths. It is impossible to conceal all the evidence. Yet how easily we forget who we really are. Because it should give us the creepts. His father's plight had been desperate indeed, for where could one go, really, to stay clean—worse, who could one be to be tolerable?

—William Gass, Middle C,  Alfred A. Knopf, 2013