Some Came Running

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. 

Three films by Dan Sallitt

I hope I'll be indulged if I hew to a journalistic convention that, for reasons that remain obscure to me, has fallen into disfavor in recent years, and begin by making a disclosure. The writer and filmmaker Dan Sallitt and I are friendly acquaintances. We run in a couple of the same social circles and hence see each other at parties as well as at some screenings. We have "done" karaoke together, once. 

That said, we're not "close." There's quite a bit I don't know about him. Until recently, for instance, I was unaware that he's also a musician, and plays in a band, which information I found moderately irritating, as I had been hoping to "corner" the "market" in film-critic-types-who-also-have-bands. While I admire Sallitt's writing on film, we differ in taste more than a bit, and I frankly find myself exasperated by certain of his critical enthusiasms. 

Sallitt has made three feature films since the late '90s; his latest, The Unspeakable Act, plays in New York as part of BAM's CinemaFest on Sunday, June 24. I think it's an absolutely remarkable film, one of the best of the year so far, and if you're around, you should definitely see it. I'm hoping it gets wider distribution, because, not to be crass or anything, I think it more than establishes Dan's bonafides in terms of deseving a wider audience, funding for more films, and all that sort of thing. If you're already familiar with Dan's films, or even if you aren't, this lengthy "conversation" at MUBI is worth reading; and below are some of my observations on Dan's work so far. 

Made in 1998, Sallitt's first feature, Honeymoon, is clearly the work of a real film artist, albeit one who is testing his fully-formed voice against his technical facility. Let me talk about its strengths first. The movie tells an unusual New York story; Michael and Mimi (Dylan McCormack and Edith Meeks, seen above) longtime friends who toil in mid-level positions in publishing, are best friends who impulsively decide to marry without, not to be crude or anything, having established whether they can get it up for each other. One of Sallitt's immediately visible strengths as a writer and director of actors is his ability to comprehensively portray an actual social type (one that was more plentiful in 1998 New York than it is in 2012, admittedly): what I used to refer to as the Too-Brilliant-Copy-Editor, e.g., the genuinely gifted and genuinely sensitive and aesthetically attuned soul that never breaks through what you might want to call a glass ceiling for reasons that are entirely their own and are not unrelated to a certain social awkwardness. This social sect is the only one, I believe that could contain non-religiously committed individuals who would marry without even getting a sense of what their sex life could be.

The resultant spectacle of two painfully smart people tormenting themselves and each other in the most civilized way possible has its farcical aspects, naturally, but Sallitt doesn't caricature his characters, and many of the scenes operate on a low-frequency but definitely palpable level of emotional pain and physical mortification that's incredibly absorbing even while largely cringe-inducing. There’s a knife-edge on which the performances teeter between naturalistic and weirdly clumsy, and at times this actually messes with the suspension of disbelief you might need to fully invest in the action. That said, the two leads are remarkable, particularly Meeks, a woman who's not necessarily conventionally attractive and yet is able to exude, in performance, a demanding, even querulous sexuality that's seemingly at odds with her intellect and politesse and preferred mode of living. 

Sallitt's shooting and editing style here is surface-plain but, as with one of his cinematic heroes Eric Rohmer, deceptively canny, but total control occasionally eludes him; now and again in a shot you get the feeling of the performers having a too-acute awareness of the camera, holding themselves back so as not to get too close to it, and so on. None of this finally compromises the film's cumulative power, which it accrues by continuously threatening to send one of its characters into a Pialat-style rage blowout but...well, I don't want to spoil it for you. You can acquire the movie for viewing in various formats/platforms at Dan's home page. 

Dan's second film, All The Ships At Sea, made in 2004, displays more directorial assurance from its very first, still shot. It also displays Sallitt's admirable powers of compression perhaps to a fault, as 64 minutes is a pretty unusual length for a feature film. This is a fully-realized work though, once again featuring the extraordinary Meeks in a lead role. She plays a woman recently escaped, or expelled, from a religious cult, and the attempt of her Catholic theologian sister (Strawn Bovee, in the still above), to reconnect with her, and help her put her life back together. 

In a sense this picture harks back to Rohmer's 1969 My Night At Maud's, a feature-length chat about religious philosophy disguised as a sex comedy. Although Ships has neither the sex nor (for the most part) the comedy (there is a fair amount of mordant humor, as when a character you don't expect this kind of language from says "Ohio, Iowa, what the fuck's the difference?"). "We believe that a lot of the spiritual turmoil in the world is happening for a reason," Meeks' Virginia tries to explain to her sister Evelyn. Eventually we come to understand that at issue here is not belief or difference of belief or lack thereof of any of the above but plain and horrific disconnection, exemplified in the simple-as-death confidence Virginia confides to Evelyn about a childhood treehouse: "No one knew about it. I built it myself." Nevertheless, Sallitt gets a lot of implied spookiness out of the shadow of the cult that hovers over Virginia. I believe it is a testimony to Dan's equanimity as a person that he has not even considered, as far as I know, taking a polo mallet to the kneecaps of the makers of Martha Marcy May Marlene.

 Still courtesy of BAMcinemaFest/Static Prods.

The Unspeakable Act is a fully realized—sure, I'll say it—masterwork, an emotionally wrenching character study that puts its uncomfortable truths forward without recourse to conventional psychology. That is, the powerful attraction super-precocious teen Jackie (Tallie Medel) feels for her older brother, the equally brilliant but possibly more well-adjusted and socially accomplished Matthew, doesn't "make sense," yet makes total sense in the context Sallitt creates for it. And once again, that context has its roots in an actual (or is it "probably actual"?) social milieu, the shabby-genteel bohemian Brooklyn that's been priced out of the Heights and whose diaspora, such as it is, extends to the likes of Ditmas Park, where the film was shot. 

Using a variety of dislocation techniques (some of which are discussed at length in Sallitt's talk with Keller), the movie brings us uncomfortably into Jackie's world, and her bedrock obsession, to the point that, fifteen minutes in, when Jackie admits "I've never slept with anyone," the sigh of relief from the viewer is apt to be seismically palpable. Once what's at stake is laid on the table, Sallitt deploys his characters in what I can only describe as alchemical chess moves. Particularly upside-the-head-smacking is how we're shown the way that the amiable and ostensibly sane Matthew actually gets off on the attentions of Jackie. When a therapist enters the picture (she is played, beautifully, by Caroline Luft, who, I should disclose, is a friend of myself and my wife's, albeit one we don't see as often as we would like; in fact, I did not recognize her on my first viewing of the film), that character gets to play not-quite-irresistable force to Jackie's seemingly immovable object. Rarely does cinema treat us to the spectacle of a person inflicting what can only be called metaphysical damage to him or her self (despite its topic, the last thing Sallitt is making here is a "social problem" picture). One of the wonders of Tallie Medel's performance, besides the way she uses her slightly-sexually-ambiguous physicality, is how she documents that damage as vividly as if she were actually physically cutting into herself, even as Jackie the character believes she's giving nothing away that she doesn't want to. 

The movie is dedicated to Rohmer, but it is entirely a Dan Sallitt work. I hope his next film comes sooner than six to eight years from now.

An interview with David Cronenberg

That's not him, obviously. That's Keira Knightley, in A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg's new film, and below the fold are Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen as Jung and Freud.

The interview, which I've edited from the transcript more minimally than I might have under other circumstances, was meant to appear in the discontinued Nomad edition, Wide Screen. Its loss is your gain! My review of A Dangerous Method for MSN Movies is here. Some prior thoughts on the film based on my New York Film Festival look at it are here. The interview follows. I have deleted our greeting pleasantries.

     KENNY: I saw the film a couple of times, and I saw your press conference with Michael Fassbender at Lincoln Center.  And you said during the press conference that when you're making a film that you never or rarely if at all think about stuff you've done before, themes relative to things you've done before, but sometimes that's the critic's job to do that.  And I was thinking relative to a few things that this film reminded me—there's a scene in the film where Keira's character is receiving the treatment and she's breaking down a bit with Michael's Jung and she talks about how she's vile and she needs to be put away and never allowed to be let out.  And that and a few other things reminded me, many things that the film's theme is partially about, the threat of a woman's sexuality.  And it reminded me a little bit of Rabid.  And because her presence in is so disruptive, in a way, to the world of Jung and Freud and I was wondering if I might be on to something and if you'd elaborate on it, if so.

     CRONENBERG:  Sure.  Well, once again, I mean quite apart from Rabid or any connections it had, it was absolutely of the essence of psychoanalysis.  How sexuality in general is disruptive.  And certainly one of Freud's revolutions was to give full acknowledgement to a woman's sexuality.  Freud has been criticized by feminists at some points for his patriarchal elements and so on.  But in fact, it can't be denied that he was one of the first—especially in that era, where women were revered as goddesses but were therefore not supposed to have sexuality or intellect—one of the first to give full voice to both women's intellect and sexuality.  And that's one of the reasons why Freud was considered subversive and disruptive and dangerous.  It was not just because of sex but also because of female sex.  There's no question about it.  And here was—you have in that scene that you're talking about—and that's a real quote from Sabina.  That's accurate reporting, she did say those things in her diary.  She…the whole idea that a woman should suddenly be asked for the first time to talk about these things, that was the talking cure.  It sounds innocuous to say it's the talking cure, but nobody wanted to hear what these crazy people had to say, until Freud said, no, no, you should listen to the crazy people because they are telling you what's going on.  They're telling you how to heal them, telling you what's wrong with them.  And of course in Sabina's case, for a young woman to be talking about being sexually aroused by her father's beatings was completely unacceptable and completely, you know, just intolerable.  And suddenly for the first time she has a man who she doesn't know giving her permission to talk about those things.  And with the concomitant sort of pain and trying to say the things and then trying not to say the things.  So yeah, I mean I think whether it connects—the various things that are disruptive forces, whether it's sexuality or other things, sure, of course they're of interest to—well, to me I think they're of interest to any dramatist really.  Sex and death.  I'm not the first.  I can't claim to be the first to deal with them. 

     KENNY: Well, that's another interesting thing, because when we're talking…well, there were three things, themes that I thought about.  Another being, this is also a film in a sense that's about the creation of the language that we use when we talk about what we talk about and when we talk about the themes of your films.

     CRONENBERG:  Well, it's also…it's really in a sense; and certainly John Kerr in his book, A Most Dangerous Method, said it this way: that these three people, in a way, invented the 20th century.  They invented modernity.  Up until this point, talking about those things, in that way, was unprecedented.  You would never have men of the professional dignity and stature of Freud and Jung exchanging the letters that we have, that they did, talking about bodily fluids and orifices, erotic dreams and stuff.  The stuff that people talk about all the time now, and you can see on anybody's blog.  But it was unthinkable for people to talk about that stuff, especially, as I say, professional people.  And then you had Sabina giving voice to the woman's version of that.  And she was absolutely their intellectual equal.  And they accepted her as that as well without condescension.  Really, all of that was quite extraordinary, and was quite new.

     KENNY: And one more thing that I think relates to some of your prior work is the theme that comes in a little later after the break between Freud and Jung, and it's in the conversation between--it's most prominent in the conversation between Freud and Sabina, and then of course in the title cards that tell you the fates of the respective protagonists, is the theme of the Jew, and the Jew as other, which is very close to something you explored most explicitly recently in the short film you made for Cannes, for the “Chacun son cinema” section in celebration of the 60^th anniversary of the festival, a short called At The Suicide of The Last Jew In The World In The Last Cinema In The World.

     CRONENBERG:  That's quite true.  It was absolutely also of the essence.  I mean Freud was acutely aware of the position of Jewishness and Jews in Austria; he couldn't avoid it.  At the time Jews were accepted in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but they had limited roles to play.  They were not allowed to be in the military, they were not allowed to be in government.  And he was very aware that psychoanalysis could be dismissed as Jewish mysticism, or some kind of Jewish charade or trick, or something.  Which is why he was very straightforwardly desperate to get Jung to be the leader of psychoanalysis in the future, because Jung was a good bourgeois Protestant Swiss German.  It would take the curse of Jewishness off the movement.  And that was absolutely one of the attractions for Freud of Jung. 

     KENNY: Have you—in terms of this theme of Jew-as-other, being something you've been exploring more recently; is there a story behind that, or is this something that you may have been exploring in more implicit ways throughout your career, or--

     CRONENBERG:  No.  No.  I certainly have friends who as they get older, suddenly become Orthodox when they were not, prior to that, very interested in being Jewish.  Is that what you're talking about?

What's that termite doing on that white elephant?

In a comment below, the participant known as That Fuzzy Bastard says of my review of J. Edgar for MSN Movies, "I rather appreciate that your good review has all the material for a bad review of, well, just about any Eastwood movie---I don't think you're in the tank, just unbothered by exactly the things that make my skin crawl. 'Stiffly solemn all the way down to its desaturated color palette..., too much of the time the dialogue is a little bit on the button.' It's all that respectable, white-elephant, reaching for authority that bugs me, and I'm always a little surprised to see such a fan of the disreputable okay with the blatant respectable-liberal-Oscar-bait that infests Eastwood's movies..." 

I found these points sufficiently interesting that I think they deserve the platform of their own post. They got me thinking about a bunch of things, among them being the fact that what I really do enjoy in the latter films directed by Eastwood is the way the ostensibly white-elephant material exists side by side with what I consider the real meat of the movies, the termite stuff, if you want to extend the Manny Farber terminology. There's a very messy dread at the heart of the film that is evoked at some of the most seemingly offhand moments. They reach a crescendo in the crucial mother-and-son confrontation of the film, a scene so utterly fraught and pathetic that it could have been plucked out of a great Fassbinder picture. And also that while my evocation of a stiff solemnity may have evoked for TFB a "reaching for authority," or respectability, the way it played for me on screen was rather different, that is, not so much Richard Attenburough's Gandhi as Carl Theodor Dreyer's Gertrud. That's not an analogy that can stand up to formal analysis, and it's not meant to, I just bring it up relative to the predominant tone I got from the picture. The atmosphere is, I think, very much deliberately kind-of-suffocating, rather than actively elevating. A fancy way of saying, I suppose, that the movie is a bit of a bummer, and all the better for it. 

As to whether or not it's actively Oscar-bait, it might be a losing game to actively argue otherwise. Just as Martin Scorsese is highly unlikely to throw a RED camera on his shoulder and take to the streets to revisit the San Gennaro festival, so too ought we not entertain expectations that Eastwood will ever make something that's NOT an "event picture" for the balance of his career. For many reasons, some of them relatively obvious. For me the most germane (or at least personally intriguing)is the fact that he is a businessman as well as an artist. But I thought the artist—the termite—found pretty profitable engagement for himself with J. Edgar. 

Schrader/DeNiro/Scorsese/Farber/Patterson

One of the many nice things about the new Blu-ray disc of the restoration of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is that the supplements restore to us  the very first audio commentary on the film, featuring the film's screenwriter Paul Schrader as well as its director. Recorded in 1986 for the Criterion Collection laser disc of the film, it's a commentary in the Criterion style—serious, frank, in-depth, not the sort of self-congratulatory "I love this shot" stuff that audio commentaries became associated with in the height of the DVD boom. In any event, when Criterion's license on the film went out, Sony began overseeing the DVD editions, and the exemplary laser disc commentary went by the wayside; somebody at Sony was on the ball enough to acquire the material from Criterion and include it here. It's still a bracing listen. From the hindsight of ten years past, and having endured any number of personal and artistic crucibles since the making of Taxi Driver, Schrader and Scorsese are in reflective frames of mind, fully cognizant of the fact that Taxi Driver was in a sense an extraordinary occurrence. Scorsese: "It was a beautiful script. There’s only two scripts that I’ve gotten that were completely there, that we hardly had to do any work on…Taxi Driver was the first one, later on it was King of Comedy by Paul Zimmerman[...] Bob and myself felt as if it had been written for us in a funny way." Schrader: "[It was v]ery much a serendipity. Three people coming together at a certain point in their lives all needing to say the same thing. You know, occasionally in art you get lucky, and you’re in the right place at the right time with the right people."

It is particularly interesting to listen to them talk about what they were feeling, about what they were doing, in conjunction with exploring what a couple of first-rate critics, Manny Farber and his partner Patricia Patterson, saw them doing in the film. The Farber/Patterson essay, "The Power And The Gory," was first published in the May/June 1976 issue of Film Comment. (Taxi Driver premiered in February of that year.) It can now be read in the Library of America's indispensible volume, Farber on Film. An extremely detailed and vivid piece of prose, it alternates so vehemently between admiration for the film and grave offense at it that it can almost be considered as a piece of Writing Against Itself. The arguments against the film are not, as it happens, as easy to dismiss outright as Pauline Kael's hideously smug and classist "What am I doing here watching these two dumb f--ks?" whinge on Raging Bull. Farber and Patterson characterize as "diversionary" the "pounding, illustrative music that grinds you," and "the spike words which stud the [...] soundtrack."'Pussy' and 'fuck' have never been harvested so often; the black race is mauled by verbal inventions spoken with elaborate pizzazz styling[...]" The picture winds up Farber and Patterson to the extent that it turns them into "plausibles," to use Alfred Hitchcock's coinage for his least favorite kind of movie viewer, and they make a list of "plot impossibles." They inveigh against the use of the DeNiro: "the intense DeNiro is sold as a misfit psychotic, and, at the same time, a charismatic star who centers every shot[...]" To some, that paradox might seem key to the film's glory, but Farber and Patterson are clearly quite irritated by this. They cannot, however, disguise their delight at the bravura filmmaking: "The amount of twisting questions that are thrown at the spectator highlights its director's boldness in intricate visuals." Still, one senses that Farber and Patterson can't enjoy their enjoyment. They deeply distrust the film. A key to reading the essay: they frequently use variations on the verb "sell," and when they do, that's a signal that they're gonna bitch about something. They even take the filmmakers to task on the marketing of the picture: "The movie's ad campaign (the poster of DeNiro as a looming presence, the interviews with crew members almost before the final mixing, the terrible schlock novel now sold in every supermarket which takes [Arthur] Bremer's diary and Schrader's script to an unbelievably trashy depth) is revelatory of what the filmmakers feel it takes to move, score, and hold your territory in a competitive U.S.A. society."

This contrasts quite a bit to Schrader's pronouncement (I'm paraphrasing here) that the Taxi Driver script leapt out of him like an animal, or Scorsese's various proclamations concerning his own identification with Travis Bickle's sense of isolation and anger. On the commentary track cited above, Scorsese's remark about feeling the script had been written for him and DeNiro comes after he recounts a clash with studio execs over matching shots in the lunch-with-Betsy scene, recollecting in tranquility that it was a "serious" clash and leaving it to the listener's imagination just how serious it was, given the personal volatility that was much more a part of the Scorsese forefront than it was in 1986, or than it is today. 

Almost forty minutes into the film, there's the shot of Travis on a pay phone after his disastrous porn-theater date with Betsy, hunching over a little, trying to make out what's gone wrong. The camera slowly tracks to the right, and into a view of an empty hallway leading to the front door of the building. Here's Scorsese talking about the shot on the commentary, as he looks at it: "We’re holding on him, and he’s just getting refused and rejected and rejected, then the camera starts to move, to the hall. As if it’s about to reveal something. And it doesn’t. The idea is meant that the revelation comes much later, when he explodes. I think this is one of the last things we shot, one of the last days of shooting…and then he enters the frame and leaves. And when I thought of that shot…it presented to me how the style of the picture would be…where the moves would be…the camera moves would seem…uh, if I could really put it in words I wouldn’t have had to put it on film." At this point Scorsese pauses and seems to gather himself. "The idea is that…theres a sense again of anxiety, a sense of uneasiness, of the camera tracking to an empty hall. Is that his soul?...Is that…the emptiness he’s feeling in his heart? Or are we about to reveal something, is there about to be an explosion, is something terrible about to happen in the hall? It was the idea of keeping the audience off balance all the time, and that was the piece…all the other shots came from that concept that’s in that shot right now. It just turned out to be one of the last shots we took, but it was the first shot I thought of."

One is reminded of Vladimir Nabokov's essay "On A Book Entitled Lolita," and the passage wherein he evokes "Mr. Taxovich, or that class list of Ramsdale School, or Charlotte saying 'waterproof,'" and then pronounces, "These are the nerves of the novel." Many an English lit major no doubt said "Really? Charlotte saying 'waterproof'?" and then paged back through the book to find the passage and see if it resonated any differently as a result. It's worth noting that the shot thus doted on by Scorsese isn't even mentioned in the Farber/Patterson essay. 

I don't know if Scorsese or Schrader ever went on record with their reaction to the Farber/Patterson essay, but the two were/are admirers of Farber, and I recall one of them describing a visit the two made to Farber's studio, where they took in his wonderful paintings, as a "pilgrimage." Also, I wonder what Farber would have made of Scorsese's recent Shine A Light, which to my mind is, among other things, very much a film about what it takes to move, score, and hold one's territory in a competitive worldwide market.

Easy Riders, Close Encounters: A couple of words about "Paul"

Because I've become friendly with Paul's director Greg Mottola (who has occasionally contributed a comment to this blog), and recently enjoyed a congenial dinner with a member of this film's cast, I can't really weigh in on the film in any "official" way, or capacity. But I would like to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it, without reservation or qualification, and that as a fan of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz I consider this a thoroughly worthy followup to those pictures and an entirely successful Pegg/Frost vehicle in every sense of the term.

Is it different from those pictures? Yes, of course it is. As co-writers' Frost and Pegg's homage to a certain period of American cinema, and fish-out-of-water tale of goggle-eyed Britishers abroad, it would have to be. What defines Paul is not just its concept but its very condition as a hybrid British-American creation, and its condition of being a bonafide big American studio comedy. And that's something certain of the backlash crowd, some of whom really seem to have their knives out for this, have against the film. I don't know what to say to that. The Blues Brothers might not be my own personal favorite outsize American comedy, but by the same token I don't think that the guys who made this film are following somewhat in its footsteps because some studio exec put a gun to their heads.

It's because The Blues Brothers is part of this picture's lingua franca. One thing I enjoyed about Paul is its lighthearted alternative history of post-1969 American cinema. Like Lost in America,not to mention that oft-cited Peter Biskind book, it takes Easy Rider as its starting point. And in case you miss that, that film's title appears on a marquee in this film's last third. I didn't see Kristen Wiig's cloistered-daughter-of-a-crazed-bible-thumper character, whose belief in Creationism and such is upended by the genial smartass E.T. Paul, so much as  a vehicle for "Christian-bashing" (if the filmmakers wanted to Christian-bash in earnest, they'd have put the science-dropping Paul up against C.S. Lewis, or somethin') than as a coeval to Rider's George Hanson (Jack Nicholson), the small-town naif whose mind is blown by Wyatt and Billy. That movie's ultimately tragic counterculture bromance, such as it is, is replaced here by actual het romance, which, given the lead characters' fanboy love that dare not speak its name, is an amusing complicating factor in the scenario. But anyway. Beginning in the world of Easy Rider—Paul's Graeme (Pegg) and Clive (Frost) are indeed two men (men-children?) who went looking for America, so to speak—it barrels not into the realm of Raging Bull but Close Encounters. For a pop-culture savvy comedy, that's absolutely as it should be. But what I enjoyed most about Paul was the way that it juggles its various cartoon humor and big-scale studio-comedy gags, pastiche elements, and endlessly knowing references (some so obscure I imagine that some of the studio overseers weren't even aware that a joke was being made; I'm thinking in particular of a throwaway crack Paul makes about looking "like a family" when he and Graeme and Clive make their first public appearance together), with a real sensitivity to the relationships between the characters, particularly, of course, Graeme and Clive. As he did with Superbad, Mottola conveys what's funny about emotionally adolescent man-love, and what's kind of silly and ridiculous about it, but he also puts across what can be moving and kind of noble about it as well. There's a real warmth and sweetness and patience about their interactions, and as frantic as the action in Paul gets, its' clear that Mottola, with Pegg and Frost as deft co-conspirators, took real care to concoct something that looks like a real bond between its characters, and that's present during both said frantic action and the very enjoyable and relaxed interstices between set pieces. 

As for the backlash? I don't know that I can get into that. OK, I admit that some material in which it was laid out just how Paul himself became such a pop culture sponge might have been helpful for some of the film's more literal-minded viewers, but in all honesty I just can't get on board with that one guy who said that the character "simply makes no sense." Makes no sense, huh? Say, have you heard this one? A horse, a rabbi, and a priest walk into a bar. The bartender says, "What is this, a fucking joke?"

Incidentally, Paul supporting player and SNL stalwart Bill Hader's Criterion Top Ten, in which he "cheats" with double features, just went up. Very good stuff, with some extremely apt and (naturally) funny observations. Check it out.

"The Fan"

There are any number of aspects to Madeleine Carroll's turn as Mrs. Erlynne in Preminger's 1949 The Fan that might be profitably commented on. But if you think I'm going to comment in such respects here, or at the Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report at The Auteurs', you are mistaken. Carry on. 

Dodge Challengers and Möbius Strips: Director Richard C. Sarafian on "Vanishing Point"

Next Tuesday Fox Home Entertainment releases a revamped DVD of the 1971 cult classic Vanishing Point in both standard definition and Blu-ray editions. Both look very fine indeed, but if you've got the equipment, the Blu-ray is the one to get. The film itself is an oddball piece that's very much of its time. Point is the story of an enigmatic driver, one "Kowalski" (played by Barry Newman, seen below with Lee Weaver), who, for reasons that remain known only to himself even after we get his back story via a series of flashbacks, is compelled to attempt a Denver-to-San Francisco jaunt...in 15 hours. Naturally his efforts attract the attention of law enforcement officials in a number of states, not to mention a blind radio DJ named "Super Soul" who becomes Kowalski's cheerleader and confessor. A combination crazy chase movie, Easy Rider-esque examination of "America," and a one-part-existentialism/one-part-mystic philosophical statement, Vanishing Point remains both compelling...and breathtakingly beautiful. Director Richard C. Sarafian followed the film with another picture chockablock with memorable imagery, Man In The Wilderness, and went on to direct and act in many other pictures, but Point remains a unique high for him. We recently spoke about it with the director, who turns 79 this year. Some spoilers are revealed in the interview, just so you know.

SCR: Vanishing Point is a movie that has fantastic imagery; you worked here with the  first rate cinematographer, John Alonzo.  The screenplay was written, under a pseudonym, “Guillermo Cain,” by the great Cuban writer Gabriel Cabrera Infante.  I wonder if you'd just give me a little bit of the background as how this very unusual film came into being, and then maybe let's talk about the process by which you created the visuals. 

SARAFIAN: I was in London and I was considering several other screenplays at the time.  One was Downhill Racer.  The other one was Serpico, and then Love Story.  At the moment I had just completed a movie that ultimately was called Run Wild, Run Free, about autism.  Anyhow, my wife, now my ex-wife, Robert Altman's sister, convinced me that I would have more fun with Vanishing Point, ‘cause it had a lot more to say and was more of a challenge for me as a director.  This was as I was considering Downhill Racer with Gene Hackman; I thought the challenge of that piece was to get into the molecule or the essence of speed and to transfer that—what Jean-Claude Killy might have seen, felt and experienced—into the audio-visual medium and the challenge of that, reaching for that. [Racer was eventually made by Michael Ritchie, starring Robert Redford—Ed.] But I didn't think that I would function well in that world.  I'd been overweight—I'm fat.  But here comes Vanishing Point, written by Guillermo, who was at one time Castro's Minister of Information, who apparently had read Jack Kerouac's On The Road, and was now writing this very graphic visual piece…and the essence of it was about freedom.  And so I saw it as about the road being an endless road and that the demise of our hero doesn't end at the bulldozer, that he goes on.  

The Cinema of Contingency: Notes on Swanberg

Joe Swanberg as Tim in LOL, Swanberg, Bewersdorf, Wells, 2006

I: Apologia

Why Swanberg? Why now?

Blame it on my snark.

In January, in the midst of some armchair commentary on the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, I noted Mr. Joe Swanberg’s pronouncements at a press breakfast at which IFC announced a partnership with the film arm of South By Southwest, in which IFC would provide VOD screenings of varied SXSW premieres simultaneous to those films’ screenings at the festival. One of the films is the latest from Swanberg, the young filmmaker whose works (frequently tagged as components of a not-quite movement dubbed “Mumblecore") are noted for their improvisational “realism” and the unusual candor of their depictions of sexual matters (e.g., Swanberg himself and varied other members of his casts engage in unsimulated sex acts therein). Swanberg’s musings on where the “interest” in his films began and ended solicited this rejoinder from your correspondent: “I think I speak for myself, and for many others, that when I hear about a new Swanberg picture my first question is "Does he show his schlong in it?" and if the answer is "Yes," my "interest" shrivels up like a Pac-Man that's just gotten it from Inky, Winky, Blinky AND Sue.”

Now, those who know me even slightly, or read this blog with some regularity, probably understand that when it comes to cheap jokes I pretty much have no superego. And my Swanberg joke was pretty cheap. But it elicited some impassioned defenses of Swanberg’s work from, at first, Craig Keller, a cinephile of great passion and erudition and one of the more forceful and tenacious arguers I know. I hadn’t been aware that Craig was such a, as I put it, “Swanbergian.” I was aware that at least one other formidable film writer on the Internet, Dan Sallitt, held Swanberg’s work in pretty high esteem. With Keller on his side, a potential front was coalescing. My post also received some intelligent comments from Tom Russell, a young independent filmmaker who’s both a Swanberg fan and associate.

If I’m going to come out and say that I for the most part reject the work that Joe Swanberg has put his name on thus far, it occurs to me that individuals such as Keller and Russell are entitled to some fuller accounting. I also wanted to take up a kind of formal challenge: to construct a rejection of Swanberg that would avoid the sort of snark I used in the above-mentioned Sundance post, and steer clear of the too-easy ad hominem attacks that Swanberg (some would say rather bravely) leaves himself open to. Before doing so, it’s incumbent on me, with my old-school journalistic ethics and all, to lay some cards on the table.