Some Came Running

Happy 4th of July!

James Cagney and company, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Michael Curtiz, 1942

Rita/Delphine

Not to keep harping on this Last Year At Marienbad disc, but its existence does give one the opportunity to see if there really is a shot-by-shot pastiche from Gilda in it, which there is not. However, Marienbad's bedroom confrontations between Delphine Seyrig's X and Sacha Pitoeff's M are clear homages to GIlda's portentous boudoir chat between Rita Hayworth's title femme and George McReady's Mundson. To wit: 

and then...

One can't really imagine two more different kinds of screen beauties that Hayworth and Seyrig, can one?

Images of the day, 7/2/09

Among the many fantastic extras on Criterion's terrific new edition of Last Year At Marienbad is director Alain Resnais' thoroughly lovely 1959 documentary short, Le chant du Styrene, a gripping account of plastic manufacture with a very clever (but of course) verse narration from the great Raymond Queneau. A colorful homage to the surreality of the industrial world that, like Marienbad, marries magnificent formal command to a quirky sense of play, it brims with eye-popping imagery, so much so that my customary single image for a day just wouldn't do. 

The Mann act: "Public Enemies"

There are some filmmakers who take the viewer into their confidence from the very first shot of a film, infusing it with such a particular atmosphere and attitude that one gives him or herself over to the picture completely, surrenders to it. Such artists are pretty rare; for myself, I count Jacques Rivette and Phillippe Garrel among them. And for quite a few cinephiles and critics, Michael Mann is absolutely one of them. 

I admit that I've become something of a Mann agnostic in recent years. I have very little use for the florid romantic/existentialist tough-guy ethos that his films don't so much explore as worship. (Hence, I found rather a lot of Heat, something of a Holy of Holies for Mann fans, overblown and silly.) It's true that Mann has a visual/narrative style like no one else working in movies today, one that toggles between the intimate and the operatic in ways that constantly surprise the viewer. But of late I've found that his big stuff works better than his small, and that his adherence to digital shooting (which I imagine is at least in part in the better to serve his intimate modes) has produced decidedly mixed results. So I went into Mann's new picture, Public Enemies, with a considerable amount of trepidation. 

I did not emerge a convert, but I wasn't entirely unimpressed, either. The more contemplative stretches of the film don't really work as Mann intended, they do come off as longueurs; but anyone who can't recognize them as art film flourishes ought to at least be suspected of willful stupidity. Dialogue along the lines of "Where are you going?"/"Anywhere I want" and "What do you want?"/"Everything, right now" and "I don't wanna be there when it happens" drives me right up the wall, always has, and boy there's plenty of that sort of thing here. But there are a few pretty spectacular set pieces here, and Manohla Dargis is right on target in her ecstatic New York Times review in which she describes certain of Mann's more bravura compositions, including a view of Johnny Depp's Dillinger—a "dark, ominous figure" that almost "blots out [the] sky." I found that pretty much at every point where I was losing patience with the film, Mann would reach into his bag and pull out another bit of purely exhilarating filmmaking. Kind of frustrating, really, but as I said above, also par for the course in most of my Mann experience.

And that said, the final 20 minutes or so of Public Enemies are staggeringly good, and make up some of the best work that Mann, and Depp, have ever done. These scenes are as wry and moving and profound and upsetting and cinematically audacious as Mann wants them to be. And it is perhaps no accident that they contain barely any dialogue. For my money, they certainly suffice to justify the film's existence. I look forward to hearing verdicts from Mann fans and sceptics alike. 

Karl Malden, 1912-2009

In Baby Doll, 1956

You want to talk about actors with no vanity? This guy is where you start. 

Vanity, of course, is not the same thing as family and/or ethnic pride. Whenever he was in a film, Malden would push for his own family name, Sekulovich, to be somehow included in is. See, for instance, Fred Gwynne's character in On The Waterfront. I always liked that about the guy.

Was Malden great in everything? No. In fact, there are quite a few who will argue that he's too broad in Waterfront.

But Lord knows he was pretty great in enough, no?

Any man who dies at the ripe old age of 97—there's not much you can say besides "God bless him." In the case of Mr. Malden, it would be fitting to say "God bless him" one or two times over. 

Last Year At Punxsutawney

"...of him who walks on once again along these corridors, through these salons and galleries, in this edifice of a bygone era, this sprawling, sumptuous, baroque, gloomy hotel..."

"...of him who walks on once again along these corridors, past the breakfast buffet, in this quaint reminder of a simpler era, this cozy, warm, friendly, cheerful B and B..."

My Lovely Wife and I have been batting around the notion that Groundhog Day is in fact a loose remake of Last Year At Marienbad. 

The moviegoing public speaks: "F**k Megatron"

All dialogue and indignant e-mail whingeing guaranteed verbatim. Okay, the Bay grumblings I made up.

INTERIOR, AN OFFICE IN A MALIBU MANSION

MICHAEL BAY sits at a computer, typing furiously. He appears to be in something of a snit, and mutters to himself as he types.

CUT TO:

Bay's computer screen. We see a section of an e-mail he is writing, as the words are inputted: "...from the terrible amateur cut down trailer which had a 23-frame flash of Megatron, if someone would of given me just one call, I could of told them the whole point of the trailer was the reintroduction of Megatron. I feel we are just out of sync on this movie..."

CUT TO:

Bay, grinding his teeth and muttering. 

BAY

Megatron...the whole point...is

Megatron...

DISSOLVE TO:

BURGER KING, WEST 42ND STREET, MANHATTAN, MID-AFTERNOON, JUNE 30, 2009

GLENN KENNY, a sometime writer who is really still too overweight to even think about being in this restaurant, but has been sorely tempted by "The Return of the Original Chicken Sandwich," stands in line and tries to blend. A young LATINA, short and stocky, waits on a longish line and chats with a FRIEND, a teenage African-American male.

LATINA

Yo, you see "Transformers" yet?

FRIEND

No, not yet...

LATINA

Aw, you're missin' out on the BEST

MOVIE,bro. That movie's THE SHIT.

FRIEND

It got Megatron in it?

LATINA

It do...but FUCK Megatron. That

other [racial epithet], Optimus Prime, 

he THE SHIT. 

FADE, AND SCENE

Absolutely three screen caps

Filling the frame with multiple signifiers, then filling it with a single signifier, then going back to the multiples, leaving the viewer to connect certain dots...this sort of thing is not uncommon in plenty of Godard films, but I think it reaches a particular peak of ferocity in 1967's Two Or Three Things I Know About Her, coming soon in a spectacular Criterion editon...

The tape recorder and other electronic geegaws, the pack of Winston, the poster for Resnais' Muriel, the copy of L'Express lead actress Marina Vlady peruses; this is mise-en-scene as zeitgeist garage sale. 

The giant red "Pax" as Godard's voice-over lampoons the "Pax Americana..."

...is rather hilariously revealed as a dishwashing detergent logo in the next shot. And note the Buster Keaton poster to the right. Is this a household of cinephilic suburbanites? Nothing in the film suggests so, but nowhere in the film are its actors playing traditional characters, or rather, are being allowed to play traditional characters; whenever Godard gets close to constructing a conventional diegesis here he immediately disrupts it. One of The Man's most fascinating pictures, and a most welcome disc. I'll surely have more about this and its companion piece Made in U.S.A. in due time...

Get "Lucky"

Gian Maria Volonte gives a beautifully insinuating performance as polyglot gangster Luciano in Francesco Rosi's intriguing, underrated chronicle of multi-generational gangsterism, Lucky Luciano, the subject of today's Foreign-Region DVD Report, at The Auteurs', where better is expected of me, apparently (see comments). 

Dork victory

Via a series of high-tech machinations which, at the moment, sheer common sense constrains me from describing in detail, I am now the proud possessor of a multi-region Blu-ray DVD player, which means I can finally see the BFI Blu-ray of Antonioni's The Red Desert, and man, it sure is looking good. The above shot is the best I could do with my current Blu-ray capture set-up (e.g., namely, a camera). Having succeeded, I now eagerly await Region B  Blu-rays of Lester's The Bed Sitting Room, Pasolini's Canterbury Tales, a collection of Jeff Keen shorts, Le pacte des loups, and more. As one internet bigwig likes to say, "Heh." 

More will be revealed when it seems safer to do so. My paranoia is spurred in part by Jeffrey Wells' putting up, and then almost immediately taking down, a post on the selfsame topic earlier today. Struck me as a bit Three Days of the Condor. What can I tell you. 

The real housewives of New Jersey remain unimpressed in any case.