Some Came Running

Armistice

Roger Livesey and John Laurie in a sublime moment from Powell and Pressburger's 1943 The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, one of the most moving and incisive and beautiful treatments of the damnable and glorious paradoxes of soldiering, a good picture to take in on this day. 

"Contract" work

How do you like that for a use of negative space, huh? That's Mr. Vince Edwards, a watch, and a tie, in Murder By Contract, another great one in the below-cited Sony collection.

It was a slow news week, movie-wise, so I used the opportunity to wax a little more philosophical about the prerogatives of film noir, particularly the above, in today's installment of Topics, etc.  over at The Auteurs'. I also ruminate a bit on our Mr. White's perhaps-too-vehement pan of Precious.

Profound views

This is the end of a thoroughly wonderful shot in Jacques Rivette's thoroughly spectacular film on Joan of Arc, but really, I haven't ruined it for you if you haven't seen the movie. It's un-ruinable, really. Artificial Eye has done us all a service by releasing the full 5-hour-plus cut of this underseen 1994 masterpiece, which is the subject of today's Foreign Region DVD Report (which is up early, because we love you) at The Auteurs'. Also featured, a clarifying tech comment from the always=dazzling Craig Keller. Dig it. 

The Pleasure Of Being Cuckolded (Or Is That Castrated?): Notes inspired by some links between Brian DePalma's "Hi, Mom!" (1970) and "Body Double" (1984)

This is my contribution to the Brian DePalma Blogathon, hosted by Cinema Viewfinder, where it is cross-posted. Thanks to Tony Dayoub for encouragement. 

In Brian DePalma's giddy, absurdist, radical early feature Hi, Mom, Robert DeNiro plays a disturbingly disaffected young man named Jon Rubin. The character was introduced in DePalma's prior film, 1969's Greetings. He's an ardent voyeur and would-be filmmaker, and he's got an inspiration. He intends to invent gonzo porn some two decades avant le lettre by surreptitiously filming himself getting it on with woman from the building across from his own (a fantasy object he's discovered in his obsessive peeping, played by Jennifer Salt).   Of course, in order to make the scheme work, he's got to meet, attract, and seduce her first, which he does by putting on the mask of a sensitive square and inventing some malarkey about a computer date. Once he's gotten her out—they attend a double feature of David and Lisa and Porgy and Bess before going to dinner—he elicits her sympathy by relating this tale of woe:

"...reminds me of something that happened to me. I was coming home... I was living with a girl, Barbara, a few years ago and, uh, it was her birthday and I came home and I had presents and, uh, cake and candles and all kinds of confetti and crepe paper, and I was rushing up the stairs, ecstatic. I opened the door very quietly, crept in, and I heard the shower running. Well I open the door to the bathroom...and I hear some voices...and all of a sudden I open the shower curtain and there...there she is with another person...they were naked...and the funny thing about it is he had this kind of laugh, this kind of evil grin...and it really threw me and I naturally ran out of the place in a state of shock, I didn't know what to do..."

As tales of cuckolding and in flagrante discovery go, it's pretty banal, and wouldn't be worth noting had not DePalma put nearly exactly the same scenario on film almost 15 years later in his controversial Hitchcock/porn-schlock pastiche Body Double. 

The Return of Jonathan Demme, Pt. 1

(Posted by Aaron Aradillas)

One of the traps critics (including myself) sometimes find themselves in is welcoming back a filmmaker when he hasn't gone anywhere. Inevitably the phrase "...a return to form" is used to describe an offering that reminds said critic of said filmmaker's "heyday." Robert Altman's The Player, John Frankenheimer's 52 Pick-Up, Sydney Lumet's Before The Devil Knows You're Dead are a few examples of this trend.

Why do I bring this up? Because Jonathan Demme's latest is about to bow at the Toronto International Film Festival, and I get the feeling critics are dying to welcome back one of their darlings. Rachel Getting Married feels like one of Demme's great early '80s humanist comedies like Melvin and Howard, and less like one of his post-Silence of the Lambs intimate epics. The funny thing is Demme has been with us all this time. His post-Lambs output has been quite remarkable, if stylistically different from his earlier work.

I thought I'd take this opportunity to look at the evolution of one the most singularly American filmmakers of the last 40 years.