Some Came Running

Geoff Dyer's "Zona"

J. Hoberman ended his excellent and largely admiring review of Geoff Dyer's new book, a lengthy, discursive, highly personal exploration/exegesis of and or "riff" on Andrei Tarkovsky's 1978 film Stalker with a backhanded compliment that's all but unimprovable, as such things go. "Zona is extremely clever — and that’s one thing Tarkovsky never was." Upon finishing the book itself, it occured to me that Hoberman was being slightly unfair there, but unfair in a way that Dyer kind of invites. I enjoyed the book to a degree that surprised me, maybe in part because I was prepared for it. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen Stalker, but I imagine it has to be at least as many times as Dyer has, and under as varied a set of circumstances. Hence, while his descriptions/evocations of certain scenes made me eager to revisit those scenes, never did I feel the actual need to put down the book and pop in the (problematic available) DVD of the movie to get my bearings. 

And Dyer's got some things to say about the movie. The offhand style of his prose voice notwithstanding, he's done some heavy lifting, thinking-wise, on both Tarkovsky the artist and this particular work. Dig this: "One of Tarkovsky's strengths as an artist is the amount of space he leaves for doubt. In Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog looks into the eyes of the bears caught on film by Timothy Treadwell and decides the chief characteristic of the universe—or 'the jungley' as he metonymically termed it in Burden of Dreams—is 'overwhelming indifference.' For Tarkovsky the artist, despite his Russian Orthodox Christian faith, despite his insistence that the epic scenery of Utah and Arizona could only have been created by god, it is an almost infinite capacity to generate doubt and uncertainty (and, extrapolating from there, wonder). This, it hardly needs saying, is a far more nuanced position than Herzog's. The story of Porcupine, Tarkovsky said later, may have been a 'legend' or myth, and spectators 'should doubt...the existence of the forbidden Zone.' So to give oneself entirely to the Zone, to trust in it as Stalker does, is not only to risk but embrace betrayal by the principle from which he draws his life. That's why his face is a ferment of emotions: everything he believes in is threatening to turn to ashes, the ledge he clings to is poised to crumble beneath the weight of his need for it, the weight that also supports it."

That's my favorite passage in the book, I think, and it encapsulates what Dyer is capable of: his formidable intellect seems fully and unselfconsciously engaged with what is, at least in part, a philosophical work of art, and he's getting some stuff out of it. In other sections of the book his other masks serve him less well, and there's an example of what brings him up short in the above passage. While I don't really have any kind of personal objection to Dyer's never capitalizing the word "god," this insistence can't help but come off as a bit of an affectation and just the sort of thing that would go down a storm when he's a guest at one of those mythical Park Slope literary dinner parties that the folks who dream about them always complain about. Dyer's made an admirable career in part out of his insistence on fluidity viz his identification, self and otherwise, as a writer. And of course as a working film reviewer who wants to be, spiritually and practically, an actual film critic, this stance is going to abrade me somewhat. By "stance" I specifially mean a "them" (film critics writing about Stalker) versus "me" (disinterested polymath Geoff Dyer writing about Stalker) hierarchy, although to his credit Dyer only applies it implicitly. (It is perhaps no accident that the only English-language film critic he cites in the book is David Thomson, who is similarly albeit more explicitly imperial.) But the multiplicity of masks this fluidity affords him doesn't always rescue him from glib disingenuousness. As salutary as the average cinephile may find Dyer's admiration for Stalker, other aspects of his taste apparently stubbornly remain other aspects of his taste, as they say. And when he deigns to dismiss "the witless Coen brothers" or allows that, on revisiting, both The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie AND Belle de Jour "sucked," he comes off like the know-somethingish head of a homicidally hip ad agency trying to get a rise out of a nerdy junior exec.

Other times his cleverness serves him much better. Addressing the mystery of the Zone's mysterious Room (no relation to Wisseau's, I hope I don't need to say), which reputedly grants whoever enters it his or her greatest desire, Dyer asks "is one's deepest desire always the same as one's deepest regret?" "If so," he continues, "then my greatest regret is, without doubt, one I share with the vast majority of middle-aged, heterosexual men: that I've never had a three-way, never had sex with two women at once?" At this point I was, I admit, seized by a desire to throw the book across the room, and then Dyer keeps pushing: "Is that pathetic or is it wisdom?" and in a little while I thought, "Oh, okay, I see what you did." Whether Dyer is being honest or "honest" or not, he's playing purposefully with a theme of the film, which has to do with the venality of human desire, or the unaspirational nature of our aspirations. Which he doesn't tell of but shows, in some slightly mortifying family reminiscences that would be poignant if Dyer didn't relate them with such coolness.

It's the coolness, finally, that is not off-putting or even confounding but a little...I don't know the word. Dispiriting? Stalker is a work of art of an unstinting and unawkward earnestness; its daunting complexity notwithstanding, it's also painfully sincere. Dyer's voice doesn't convey so much a distrust of sincerity as an evasion of it, and one isn't sure during the passages wherein he makes himself look rather silly, as the bits in which he bemoans the loss of a beloved Freitag bag made of recycled tarps and seatbelts,  as to where the effect he's going for breaks off from, you know, actual silliness. (My advice to him here is: you're a year older than me, pal. Forget the Freitag thing and next time you're in Paris go to the A.G. Spalding store on Rue Bourg Tebourg and pick yourself up a nice leather murse, you can totally afford it.) "Stalker has long been synonymous both with cinema's claims to high art and a test of the viewer's ability to appreciate it as such. Anyone sharing Cate Blanchett's enthusiasm—'every single frame of the film is burned into my retina'—attests not only to Tarkovsky's lofty purity of purpose but to their own capacity to survive at the challenging peaks of human achievement." As a fellow lover of Stalker, I don't find Blanchett's enthusiasm in the least bit fulsomely stated; Stalker is in a sense an INVASIVE work of art, and for all the ambiguity it contains it's also suffused with a proud Russian Orthodox defiance; it's not, "this is my truth, now you tell me yours," it's "this IS true." As for Dyer though, well, can't yousense his discomfort in the above passage? I really wonder just what the hell he's afraid of. Like, if he truly gets off the pot and yells I LOVE THIS, the kids at Slate are gonna like him less? Who knows? Of course, the very act of writing this book itself can be seen as getting off the pot and yelling I LOVE THIS, but...upon reading the book entire, one can actually be less convinced of this somehow. Weird.

This Saturday at the Tishman Auditorium in Manhattan, Dyer will head a fascinating panel (Walter Murch, Philip Lopate, Francine Prose, Michael Benson, and, sigh, one of the kids from Slate, Dana Stevens) for "Tarkovsky Interruptus," where Stalker will be screened in installments, which the assembled will discuss interstitially. An interesting idea. I will attend and report; details on the event are here. 

Blu-ray Consumer Guide: March 2012 Edition

Hello, remember me? 

Equipment: Playstation 3, domestic discs, OPPO BDP 83, import discs, Panasonic Viera TC-P50S30 the display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV the amp. 

Anatomy of a Murder (Criterion)

Even in the wrong—that’s right, wrong—Academy ratio framing of this 1959 film released on DVD by Sony many years back, this picture maintained a great deal of its fluid multi-leveled visual complexity. The correct 1.85 framing and the boosted detail here (some of which, admittedly, conks out briefly for a shot or two at a time—look for decreased forehead-wrinkle levels in a shot in the first Gazzara/Stewart confab about 19 minutes in, for instance) AMPLIFY that quality, which helps in turn to reveal why it is, in fact, one of the Great Films. The shot of Stewart’s character scoping out the awards and newspaper clippings on the wall of the Thunder Bay Inn here shows Preminger as a definite info-fiend precursor to David Fincher. Haven’t explored extras but don’t need to to award this a personal:— A+

Annie Hall (MGM)

1970s New York in color is practically its own genre. What’s cool about the imaginary genre are the connections within it; while the worlds of this film’s characters and those of Taxi Driver are in a sense universes apart, they’re not entirely unrelated of course and you can sense that without much effort. The grit of Gordon Willis’ cinematography here (and given director Woody Allen’s disinclination to work with movie-adequate light in many scenes, it can get gritty indeed) well complements Allen’s least romanticized vision of New York, New York, and this disc delivers that grit more than adequately. As it’s a release of a Woody Allen film the extras are a non-issue, but if the idea of a Blu-ray of this title means anything to you at all, you will not be disappointed with this, image-wise. —A

The Apartment (MGM)

The sub-theme of this particular installment of the guide could be “Preservation as opposed to Restoration.” This high-def upgrade of the less-than-entirely-insouciant (and all the better for that) 1960 Billy Wilder comedy is a pretty straight thing: a competent high-def rendering of a beautiful film made from obviously solid materials. As such, it’s not what you’d call “eye-popping.” At least not immediately. Refreshingly, though, it doesn’t appear to have been screwed with overmuch, with respect to still-somewhat dubious tools like DNR. So this represents an iteration of a conscientiously undertaken preservation of the film for your home viewing pleasure, which will be substantial indeed. That is, even though the image won’t make you say “Holy cats” immediately, you’ll have an almost unconscious appreciation of the quality of the image. Sonics hew to the enhanced-but-not-redefined ethos. Very nice. —A

The Ballad of Narayama (Eureka!/Masters of Cinema U.K. import, region B locked)

The Eureka!/MOC high-definitioning of the crazy world of Shohei Imamura (which is the crazy world of us all, in  a sense) continues to yield staggeringly wonderful results. This 1983 film, treating a small mountain village culture, is in the sense of setting a kind of inverse of 1968’s Profound Desires of the Gods, which depicted the inhabitants of a small near-tropical island. Here we start out with a lot of snow and frozen breath, beautifully captured by cinematographer Masao Tochizawa, whose CV also boasts some nature docs but who, more importantly, also shot Profound Desires. The movie itself is top-tier Imamura anthro-surrealism and, and one enthusiast on the IMDB noted, “Teaches you how to love your parents and kids.” A twenty-minute video intro by Tony Rayns is excellent. —A+

Birth of a Nation (Kino Lorber)

The greatest problem film of our great nation’s history on Blu-ray at last. (And still, those “censored Looney Tunes” have yet to turn up from Warner Archive. ) Quite a package, too; a new high-def master of the 1915 feature on the Blu-ray, and two separate standard-def DVDs featuring the Shepard restoration of ’93, a doc, a bunch of Griffith shorts (and boy you gotta love Griffith’s SHORTS); anyway, a cinephile package of distinction. One aspect of film preservation/restoration that’s advanced almost hand in hand with the improvements in video technology relates to our expectations as to how GOOD films of almost one hundred years of age can look. Well do I remember showing William K. Everson the first laser disc of this film, and his intrigue, excitement, and slight skepticism. This version has a detail level that is pretty remarkable walking almost hand in hand with obvious artifacts of digital “improvement.” As early as five minutes in, a shot of a pillared doorway covered by a drape, right before Lillian Gish’s entrance; the patterning of the drape is extremely vivid, while the fur on the cat sitting on the stoop under the drape’s hem seems washed out. These little things represent the give-and-take that necessarily goes into every such process. In the aggregate, the choices made here, including the level of the tinting, FEELS correct. The ultimate effect is that of…well, that of watching a nearly one-hundred-year-old film. Only three years to go. —A+

Casino Royale (MGM)

Given the peculiar-to-say-the-least production history of the film, one might expect a Blu-ray of it to look a bit of a mess, and this IS mixed to be sure. But mostly on account of the optical and other effects used in the film itself, which, along with the fact that the weird thing had almost a half-dozen directors, prevents the Bond, spoof from achieving a really unified look, and that’s kind of half the fun. As a Blu-ray presentation this is really pretty damn good. I am particularly fond of how the much-bruited-by-audiophiles music soundtrack comes off on my system (NHT tower speakers for left and right channels BOI!!!). And there are some gorgeous visual bits BESIDES the top-drawer female cast, with the cartoon-Expressionist Mata-Bond-in-Berlin sequence taking the cake as it usually does. I do love this picture, so I’d be all over it even without the explanatory doc chronicling how this movie got so odd. —A

Colombiana (Sony)

Hey kids! If you play this Sony Blu-ray on a PlayStation 3 there’s some doohickey that makes that picture of Zoe Saldana praying with/to a gun into your Playstation wallpaper or screen saver or something. It’s kind of neat until you don’t want it or your wife’s thinking you’ve all of a sudden got this weird Zoe Saldana thing, and you don’t know how to get rid of it! Oh, and the disc of this quite enjoyably trashy Megaton concoction looks pretty fine too, and is of course damn loud. —A- 

Fort Apache (Warner)

As one movie site proprietor has snarled on his own site, this is not one of Warner’s 8K frame by frame scanned repair jobs or any such thing; it’s a more standard issue high-def transfer of materials in good overall shape but showing a little damage here and there. That’s one reason you can get the thing for a little over twelve bucks on Amazon, and if you’re a fan of the film or of Ford in general you absolutely should, because the overall high quality of the image is maintained consistently throughout, yielding a very satisfying viewing experience of the movie itself. So there you have it. —A

The Helmstrom Chronicle (Olive)

One reason you gotta love the IDEA of Olive Films is that the outfit will put this kinda arcane pop culture artifact, a clever 1971 fake-doc in which the paranoid (or is he?) titular scientist uses a lot of awesome insect footage to propagate a theory that the creatures are not going to just outlive us but in fact maybe KILL US ALL or something. One reason you sometimes gotta love the idea of Olive more than the reality lies in the too-pink fleshtones of actor Lawrence Pressman as the titular scientist. And one reason you gotta hedge a bit on this issue is because you don’t remember if that was a problem with the film as screened back in the day, and also because the insect footage itself is pretty damn eye-popping. So you once again decide to accept and kind of cherish something like this mixed gift. —B+ 

Manhattan (MGM)

Is this Allen’s absolute masterpiece, or merely his most formally accomplished film? Good question, one this column was not really designed to address, but in any event this disc is the best way for home viewers to properly grapple with it. Allen went for a bit more quasi-Expressionist gloss with his follow up to this, Stardust Memories, but here he and Willis get an ideal-but-not-(overtly)-idealized widescreen black-and-white view of the title town. This is the best I’ve seen it look since theatrical and FAR better than any prior DVD. Highly recommended if you’ve got any affection for the thing at all. Another feast of supplement-withholding, of course. Can you imagine what will happen if Criterion ever wants to do an Allen film? —A 

Man of the West (MGM, German import, region B locked)

The 1958 Anthony Mann picture a very distinctive look to it, particularly in the sere and treacherous final third. And at first I thought this German import Blu-ray wouldn’t live up to that look, because during the film’s opening credits the colors  are pretty damn dull and washed-out. HOWEVER, after said credits things perk up  QUITE a bit, and resolve into an extremely absorbing presentation. Always nice to get two Arthur O’Connell films in the column in the same month.—A

Nothing Sacred (Kino Lorber)

This is a high-def transfer of a preserved print from the George Eastman House. The Technicolor of this 1937 picture is all over the place and generally resolves in that kind of soft pink undertone that’s about the last thing I actually want in Technicolor. But for all that it’s still the best presentation of the film I’ve yet seen.  I rather wonder if a full-bore restoration (assuming there are materials apt to be restored) would redefine this picture, which in its current form looks more like some sort of cinematic anomaly than a prestige production of its time. —B-

Notorious (MGM)

Solid, unspectacular, and essential. Of the three Hitchcocks coming out on Blu-ray from MGM, I suppose this is the one I WANTED to look the absolute best, and it’s not. (To find out which is, keep reading.) We recall that this is the film for which Hitchcock asked DP Ted Tetzlaff, as they were preparing a shot that was to cut from a transparency screen shot, “Don’t you think it would be a good idea to have a little light on the side, sweeping across the backs of their necks, to represent the motorcycle headlights that are shown on the transparency screen?” to which a perturbed Tetzlaff initially responded, “Getting a bit technical, aren’t you, Pop?” As usual Hitchcock the technician was pushing the studio apparatus as far as it would allow and the high-def transfer shows it, much as it does on the Criterion The Lady Vanishes. Hence, the somewhat silken feel that I associate with this movie is diffused ever-so-slightly. I understand this effect is mostly psychological. But it brings up a potentially new wrinkle in the transfer integrity issues that so bedevil this particular format. Still. A must. —A

On The Bowery  (Milestone)

Lionel Rogosin’s 1957 doc/fiction hybrid, a searing portrait of non-lush life with the lushes of lower Manhattan, was a kind of tryout reel for the socially-conscious filmmaker’s even more galvanic Come Back, Africa. Terse but compassionate, thoroughly unsentimental, it teems with views and moments that make it like an unwritten Liebling piece or Luc Sante exploration set into motion. In utterly beautifully black and white and backed with a raft of fascinating extras including a mordantly ironic ‘60s antiwar film by Rogosin, it’s the kind of package that should be the reason every hardcore cinephile bought a Blu-ray player for in the first place. —A+

Rebecca (MGM)

THIS, as it happens, is the best looking of the three Hitchcock Blu-rays on MGM, and for the most part, it is REALLY fucking spectacular. Which some will find ironic, or at least something of an irritating coincidence, as they might consider this romance-with-thriller-elements completed under the very pressing aegis of David O. Selznick to be the least Hitchcockean of Hitchcock films. To which I say bosh, anyway. As much as I object, say, to yo-yos who insist that if only Terrence Malick had a strong producer who’d inhibit him from going all goofily New Age we could get another Badlands or Day Of Heaven, in retrospect it is quite interesting to see how an auteur such as Hitchcock occasionally asserted his prerogative from under the Selznick yoke. The “Hitchcock touch” applied to a job of work, as it were. It’s there from the very start, as in the dream tracking shot through the gates of Manderlay, through the caricature of the horrid “friend” (Florence Bates AS Edyth Van Hopper, apologies and thanks to jbryant) whose “paid companion” Fontaine’s character is, and so on. Kind of makes one want to look at Mr. and Mrs. Smith. And every sequin of Selznick’s opulent production value glitters here. Pretty awesome. —A+

 Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Fox)

The picture is beautiful and the sound is over-loud  right off the bat. Story of your life when it comes to contemporary sci-fi blockbusters on Blu-ray, so what are you going to do? (And before you think go thinking “if it’s too loud you’re too old,”  I’ll say that I still happily crank the likes of Back in Black and/or Raw Power at levels well above the -5 dB setting on my  bigass amp whenever I get the opportunity, which admittedly isn’t too often. What the issue here is of proportionate volume. And it’s too loud. Which is easily fixed. And the picture does the CGI effects the service of not making them look more like CGI than they already do, which does not obtain, for whatever reason, on many other  Blu-rays of this sort of fare. —A

Seven Chances (Kino Lorber)

In the continuing tale of the Kino Lorber Keaton Blu-rays, this one is excellent, super crisp, really beautiful, a good companion piece to the company’s superb Blu of The General. Although it is not, overall, as great a film as The General. In a way its not-being-as-great-a-filmness actually enhances one’s appreciation of Buster’s ability to enliven a film as a PERFORMER. This restoration also features an opening made in an early iteration of Technicolor  that highlights the then-inchoate process as a kind of novelty. It’s all transferred at a very high level, no more of this “interlaced” B.S. like the Blu of Our Hospitality. Highly recommended. —A

 Silent Running (Eureka!/Masters of Cinema U.K. import, region B locked)

I love some of the offbeat programming choices the Masters of Cinema folks make. I remember when this came out in 1972. Everyone thought a film directed by vaunted visual effects guy Douglas Trumbull was gonna be a mindblowing sci-fi spectacular, but this was more an earnest message-oriented chamber piece set in an environment dependent on visual effects rather than defined by them. Put another way, the effects here are about convincing rather than wowing, and the dominant tone is set early on when lead actor Bruce Dern is seen watering plants while wearing garb that puts one in mind of a Biblical prophet, like Noah. I myself was delighted to rediscover this eco-crusading cinema parable, and your mileage may vary; it helps to be big on Bruce Dern. But (to paraphrase Robert Christgau) if you’re not at least a LITTLE big on Bruce Dern, why are you reading this blog. Anyway, as most Masters of Cinema products do, this disc not only provides a gorgeous presentation for the film, but the whole package makes a strong case FOR the film. Highly recommended. —A+

Spellbound (MGM)

Some glass-half-empty types were grousing about this before it was even released, speculating that the transferers-that-be might flub the flash-of-red effect near the end, but the effect is there and the transfer is solid from stem to stern, that is, the scratches that the nympho patient leaves on the hand of Harry the attendant are quite vivid, the deglammed Ingrid Bergman drab in a very vivid way, and so on. It’s one of Hitchcock’s weakest pictures not so much because of the picture-book Freud of Ben Hecht’s patronizing script (although that doesn’t help) but because it’s so steadily humorless. Really, Hitchcock shoulda let Dali go hogwild on Bergman with the ants, that woulda been FUN. In any event, of the three Hitchcock/Selznick Blus under consideration here, you could call this the most skippable. Or buy it used. Or something. —B+

A Star is Born (Kino Lorber)

Another Selznick/Wellman Technicolor classic, a kind of What Price Hollywood retread that benefited from the personal experiences of all the behind the scenes players, and unspoiled on screens well before there was a Los Angeles branch of AA for poor Norman Maine to check out. I think. Another transfer from a George Eastman House print, and the color is in better shape than that on Nothing Sacred. Very watchable but still a little curio-esque, which is too bad. Essential cinema for sure though. —A

Stars and Stripes Forever (Fox)

Why is this 1952 screen biography of John Phillip Sousa on Blu-ray? Does it have a cult or something? If so, where IS that cult? Maybe watching the thing will help answer at least the first question. Well, the movie IS in Technicolor, and really pretty Technicolor, and it’s just gorgeously rendered here, almost (almost is an important word) as ravishing and clean as what you get on a Criterion Powell/Pressburger. It also, believe it or not, features Debra Paget in a white leotard doing a hoochie dance almost as inflammatory as the one she does in Lang’s Tiger of Eschnapur. And here, the detail of 1080p really DOES make a difference, if you know what I’m saying and I suspect you do. It’s also rather interesting to see Clifton Webb, in the role of Sousa, trying to butch up a bit. At times he looks like Red-period Robert Fripp, which is super weird. I really like this disc, but I have to admit it’s really only for Technicolor freaks, demo-disc seekers, Debra Paget droolers, and Sousa devotees. I may belong to three of those four categories. —A

Terrorizers (Sony, Taiwan import, region free)

You wanna know ANOTHER reason I hate that stupid Dan Kois “Cultural Vegetables” article? Yeah, I know, “No,” but I’m gonna tell you anyway. This sentence: “Yes, there are films, like the 2000 Taiwanese drama Yi Yi (A One and a Two) , that enrapture me with deliberate pacing, spare screenplays and static shooting styles. I’ve watched Yi Yi five times and never once dozed off over 15 cumulative hours of low-key Taiwanese domesticity.” Goddamn. With this string of banalities that don’t even mention director Edward Yang, Kois attempts a defanging of the great filmmaker. I imagine this attempted defanging is inadvertent because I infer that Yi Yi is the only Yang picture Kois has seen. But the coziness that Kois evokes in his description of Yi Yi is NOT EVEN skin-deep and Yang himself was of course a vital, radical, angry filmmaker, as one can glean from watching as few as ten minutes of his 1991 A Brighter Summer Day, for instance. Or this amazing 1986 picture, which I still have yet to fully or even partially process critically. But man, about the region-free high-def rendering here: Wowsers. BEAUTIFUL picture quality; just an excellent cleanup without over stressed DNR or such. You almost never see Asian films from the ‘80s looking this good; it’s part of a series of significant Taiwan features restored for Blu-ray that also include Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour, which I hope to get to next time. A VERY encouraging development for Blu-ray here, for sure, albeit not a cheap one, particularly stateside. —A+

Two Lane Blacktop (Eureka!/Masters of CinemaU.K. import, region B locked)

There are some films that I’d happily run on a loop in whatever viewing environment available. This is one of them. It’s sufficiently perfect, in my mind, that I almost don’t even want to know anything about it outside of it. Which is not to say that the supplements the Masters crew have attached to this are unwelcome. But the thing for me is the film, a very apt upgrade from the Criterion standard def version of a few years back. An upgrade in which every dingy diner and gas station, every endless horizon, every too-sun-bright small town, looks ever that much more…perfect. American classic, Melville-worthy stuff, unimpeachable, all that. —A+

Witchfinder General (Odeon, U.K. import,  region free)

Good God, how many video versions have their BEEN of this underground not-exactly-horror classic? All manner of various issues involving rights and materials appear to have been solved since back when poor Tim Lucas was bemoaning music cue replacements. I myself was not able to keep up and am still not sure of how up-to-date I am NOW, but I can report that in the recent Blu-ray version the film’s predominant texture resides in the realm of Wicker Man-redolent light diffusion. Which gives an impression of softness, as they say. The definition isn’t ABSENT, merely difficult to fully glean. Things perk up about 25 minutes in, with the ick-laden “you may come to my room tonight” scene. But honestly, the image quality, while never out and out bad, is rather variable, but it’s a feature of the film itself, not of the transfer, which is first-rate. A really notable film with a really top Vincent Price performance, but I’m thinking you know that, so buy with confidence, as they say. —A 

Hey JC, JC, you're all right by me...

Yeah, I liked John Carter. MSN Movies review here.

Note to self: never go "full suicidal depression"

I recently began writing a cultural column for a website that addresses the concerns of citizens over fifty years of age. Yeah, I know. You can't read it yet because the site's still in beta, but rest assured, when it goes "live" I'll let you know, even if you aren't over fifty years of age. In any event, I sent the below to my editor warning him that the contents were a little on the "downbeat" side, and he wrote back to me saying, yeah, they were, and that's why he was gonna decline to run it. So I have to come up with something else. FML, as the kids say. Anyway, I figured I'd put it up here so the last couple of days of downbeat cogitation wouldn't be a total waste. N.b. that the title, the styling, and the general mode of address are undertaken with an imaginary audience not entirely like the one for this blog in mind, so bear with that, if you would be so kind. 

Mr. Jones and me, and you

The short, impish, British Monkee, Davy Jones, died at the end of February at the relatively young age of 66, of a heart attack. The eulogizing that went on in the various cyber arenas rather predictably touched on the burning question of the musical validity/authenticity of the ‘60s group referred to in some quarters as “the Pre-Fab Four” (for the record, my own contribution to the Twitter debate was the bald statement “The Monkees made great records. Period.”). Which was followed by sentimental romanticizing about how Jones died with his boots on, so to speak, still plugging away on the showbiz circuit. One entertainment blogger who makes something of a specialty of demonstrating his courageous honesty by finding something vinegarish to say about every celeb whose death notice comes under his transom wrote, “I was walking south on Eighth Avenue when I happened to notice he was doing a live show in a modest venue near the corner of 42nd Street. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Well, it's a gig at least.’” Guess it’s a good thing for this guy’s sense of self-worth that there’s no blogger equivalent of B.B. King’s Times Square nightclub, the venue in question. Which does, truth to tell, book nostalgia acts mostly. In any event, the conventional wisdom is that if you’re still doing what you love when you kick it, you’ll have gone out somehow somewhat ahead of the game.

Then again, it’s arguably all a matter of perspective. It happens I have a friend, a contemporary of Jones', who worked with the man WAY back in the day, on stage, when they were both child and teen actors respectively. “Well,” my buddy, whose subsequent life/career trajectory was rather different from Jones’, reflected, “this business is even tougher than usual when you come into the way we did.” Jones and my friend were among the last of the “born in a trunk” kind, post-vaudevillian entertainers from childhood on, trained and thrown on a stage so early they never even necessarily got to figure out if they were in fact doing what they loved. And while I’m all for the notion that doing what you love, either professionally or as a hobby, can keep you young at heart and of brain, the culture these days does tend to spin a pretty facile narrative around that notion. That narrative contains at least two fallacies: first, that one reason doing what you love is desirable is that doing what you love is easy, or it should be, you know, provided you love it enough. The other is that doing what you love will be a kind of panacea that’ll take care of all the other ills of your life, and life in general. Going all utopian on the idea tends to, among other things, elide all sorts of economic/structural realities. But it also ties in to another rather dubious cultural meme, all about our “stories.” This week I saw the movie “Being Flynn,” which was adapted from the memoir “Another Bullshit Night In Suck City,” and the title change tells you everything you need to know about the movie, really. In any event, at one point in the movie, its hero, a young writer (who, to be fair, DOES encounter some difficulty in doing, you know) observes, “We all need to create a story that makes sense of our lives.” This observation may indeed have its roots in Joseph Campbell or someone equally venerated, but the last time I heard it put so flatly was in a damn Citibank commercial. My own takeaway from a too-soon death like that of Jones’ (a cultural figure I certainly respected but did not hold hugely dear), or anybody else’s, eventually gets to the inadequacy of our own platitudes to really deal with them.

"And when it's time to relax/Miller stands clear/beer after beer..."

Or perhaps not.

On exiting a Wednesday night screening of Project X, I was surprised to encounter an esteemed cultural critic of my acquaintance, someone I never expected to be taking in the film. (And come to think of it, I never DID find out why he was there.) "Isn't it funny," I said, "how invariably horribly politically retrograde these ostensibly radically outrageous teen films tend to be?" "Indeed," he responded, smiling wryly and adding, "I have to say, as a homosexual, I was a little nervous."

The rampant hostility displayed by Project X is enough to make pretty much all humans nervous. And of course the one "demo" the movie isn't overtly hostile to, straight white male teens, it merely lies to. My review for MSN Movies is here. 

Lina Romay, 1954-2012

Female Vampire, Jess Franco, 1973

The Spanish actress took her film alias from a big-band singer her mentor, director Jess Franco, particularly admired. She outlived her namesake by about two years.

Michel Mourlet wrote that Charlton Heston's presence in a film was sufficient to create beauty. Romay's presence in a film was sufficient to create that atmosphere of perdition that Robert Benayoun pointed out as the key characteristic of "authentic sadistic cinema."

I met her and Franco once, at a Chiller Theatre Expo, in 1999 I believe, and she was superbly down-to-earth and surprisingly shy, her poor English making her even more abashed by fans' enthusiasms than she might have been. Seemed quite the trouper in any event. The great Tim Lucas has more, and better, here. 

"Being Flynn" and nothingness

Okay, the movie's not THAT bad. But it does slice the balls right off of Nick Flynn's excellent book Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, and yes, I know Flynn's an executive producer on this and no, I don't begrudge him a goddamn thing. My review for MSN Movies is here. One thing I didn't get to complain about in my review is how every damn movie depicting a twelve-step program meeting invariably bathes whatever room in question in sickly green flourescent light, right before invariably commencing an entirely perfunctory montage showing that Recovering Addicts Come From All Walks Of Life And Isn't That Wonderful. 

"Choke," not just a novel by Chuck Palahniuk anymore

My instant (sort of) Best and Worst of the Oscars, for MSN Movies. 

Erland Josephson, 1923-2012

In Nostalghia, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983.

David Hudson's MUBI Notebook entry leads to several worthwhile considerations of the great, great actor. 

The auteur is present

Last night, the 25th of February, was a big night in the big town, culture-wise. Bjork was doing her "Biophilia" show at Roseland. Philip Glass and his ensemble gave a perhaps not-to-be-repeated-in-this-lifetime performance of his amazing three-hour-plus work, Music In Twelve Parts (the Glass equivalent of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier or Young's Well-Tuned Piano, essentially), at the Park Avenue Armory. And over at Lincoln Center, there was a special screening of Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret, after which Lonergan and select cast members spoke of the shot-years-ago critical cause celebre. Jaime Christley, one of the most crucial of the film's champions, was there (I was at the Glass concert myself, which was SO AMAZING), and he tweeted later that Lonergan himself chastised a viewer who was loudly crinkling a candy wrapper during a crucial scene. This reminded me of a couple of things, chiefly of Frans Liebkind saying "You are ze audience, I am ze author, I OUTRANK you." Although I imagine that the candy-wrapper crinkler wasn't aware at the time that he was being shushed by the director.

Back in 1987 I was working at Video Review magazine, and some time during my then-one-year tenure there I had been introduced to the work of director Andy Sidaris. Sidaris was then the king of more or less direct-to-video T&A action movies, which invariably featured super-busty former Playmates awkwardly carrying guns and taking on drug-dealing bad guys so pockmarked they made Robert Davi look like a Proactiv spokesmodel. The movies were invariably ruthless in keeping their female leads as frequently topless as possible; it seemed these fetching freelance investigators were constitutionally incapable of discussing the day's events without explicitly stating that it would be best to do so naked, in the hot tub, and then taking action to make it happen. Never any lesbian action, though; Sidaris pictures were also kind of ruthlessly hetero-normative, as they say. 

They were also, it might go without saying, entirely ridiculous, and risible. So when a bunch of the Video Review guys, most of us in our highly glib twenties, were invited to an actual screening of a new Sidaris picture, which I believe was Hard Ticket to Hawaii, pictured above, to be followed by a press dinner at a deli across the street with the director himself, we were all over that. It was at a small screening room on Park Avenue, and there wasn't enough room in a single row for our entire party to fit, so I sat one in from the aisle in the row behind my boys...and about 40 minutes or so into the movie, which we had been wisecracking and giggling at MST3K style for the whole time, an older gentleman of Greek extraction took the seat on the aisle, next to mine.

It was Andy Sidaris. And he did not understand what was so funny. "Cool it guys," he addressed the row in front of him. Looking at me, he asked, "What are they laughing at?" I actually felt kind of bad, and shrugged. "The big twist is coming up," he said with some enthusiasm.  You have to give Sidaris this: in addition to copious enormous boobies, his fast-moving films were packed with explosions, action, and, um, plot twists. I think the one in Hard Ticket involved a giant cheap fake animatronic cobra emerging from an exploded toilet. Nothing funny about that. 

Fortunately it was dark enough in the theater that Sidaris could not later identify the party of gigglers, and he amiably regaled my colleagues and I with tales of his days shooting professional sports, and how he had directed all of the football sequences in M*A*S*H, and what a no-talent prick sonofabitch Robert Altman was. 

Now for the funny part. In the fall of 2001, I'm in the same screening room, in the same row, in the same seat, about to see a pre-release, pre-New York Film Festival screening of The Royal Tenenbaums. This is the cut that ends with the Anthology recording of The Beatles' "I'm Looking Through You," and it's always bugged the crap out of me that that music had to be changed for the release. In any event, who comes along and takes the aisle seat next to me but Wes Anderson. 

"This is really weird," I said to Anderson. "I've only ever sat directly next to a director at a screening of his film once before, and it was in this same screening room, and I was sitting in this same seat."

"Who was the director?" Wes asked me.

"Andy Sidaris."

"Who?"

I began to explain, but then the lights went down.