Some Came Running

"Hello," I love you

Sorry for the light posting lately. Aside from the usual, whatever the usual is, I've been having some irksome computer issues. Send money. (Just kidding. But seriously: send money.) No, anyway, there's a really first-rate picture opening a little bit this Friday, Todd Louiso's Hello, I Must Be Going, featuring a spectacular performance from the luminous and acute Melanie Lynskey. More in my review for MSN Movies. 

In other movie news, The Words fail, ar ar ar. This is in a sense a fascinating not-good movie with respect to a kind of willful blindness and romanticization pertaining to writers and writing and texts, and maybe when I can think a little straighter I'll get into it more here. 

A girl and a gun or maybe a grapefruit

From William Wellman's The Public Enemy, which is one of the Fifty Great Gangster Movies I chose for a gallery at MSN Movies. Apologies for the navigation and loading issues, as ever. 

The gallery's peg, or one of them, is John Hillcoat's Lawless, a bootlegging actioner that doesn't entirely transcend its Shia LaBeouf Problem but still provides a decent amount of bang, as I argue in my review.

"The Cinephiliacs" and me

My friend Peter Labuza, proprietor of the site LabuzaMovies, has started a new venture, a podcast series, which is what all the kids are into nowadays. It's called The Cinephiliacs, and when Peter first pitched me on it he said he aspired to make it an equivalent of Marc Maron's "WTF" for film lovers. And speaking of WTF, Peter asked me to be his first guest. Seriously, though, it was an honor, and a fascinating and not labor-unintensive experience. We cover quite a bit of ground and I get quite a bit off of my chest—I don't recall if I cried or not, I might have—and while I'm gonna take a little break from myself before I listen to it, you don't have to. Go here for the whole story, and enjoy. I hope. If you do, tell your friends.

It was DeNiro.

I hate to steer you to the troublesome navigation waters yet again, but I did a gallery of the "Ten Best" DeNiro performances for MSN Movies, and it's the same deal as the family films gallery only there are fewer films so maybe it'll be a less drawn-out pain in the ass to read. 

Of course trying to discuss DeNiro in terms of a ten best is kind of ridiculous, rather like (and sorry to sound like an old boomer here) trying to come up with a "definitive" ten best Beatles/Rolling Stones song list. Can't be done. There are those that will argue that it CAN be done, that there has to be an objective measure by which ten and ten alone will constitute THE ten that are best, but, you know... In any event, I took a tack here that's not quite contrarian but definitely steered away from aleady-established fan favorites and tried to throw a spotlight on his less ostensibly showy work. It's funny, I recently wrote a proposal for a monograph on DeNiro and was asked to use a similar format, e.g., choose ten "representative" performances, and made a list/text that was quite substantively different. When considering the best he's done, and the changes he's gone through, and that his current standing was arrived at by NOT burning out in a way that a lot of his other precursors (as we understand them) did, he gets more interesting. 

As a kind of compensation for the anticipated irrigating navigation, I will tell you the origin story of the phrase "It was DeNiro..."

It was the summer of 1987, and an old girlfriend had finagled for me the opportunity to house-sit this gigantic loft apartment right above Woolworth's on 14th Street. It was a weird thing, because the apartment belonged to another ex-boyfriend of hers, whose relationship pre-dated mine, but one thing about dating mores in New York in the '80s is that everyone made a big deal out of acting like they were just cool with EVERYTHING, so there you are. Anyway, this cat fellow was into finance and traveled a lot but had this one cat he totally doted on that needed feeding. So I moved in for a few weeks and basically turned the place into a crash pad where my then-bohemian then-buddies could hang out while under the influence of various psychotropic drugs, mostly ecstasy and super-speedy acid. And it was on one morning around Labor Day weekend when a bunch of us were still up at like seven in the a.m. and watching "Good Morning America" on the really pathetic thirteen-inch color TV that was the apartment owner's only mass-media machine. (He had plenty of money but was on some kind of Asia-inspired quasi-Zen "don't consume shit" kick at the time, I gathered.) Among our number was this droll cat named Kiel who worked at an East Village bar of some noteriety. Rolling Rock was the hipster beer of choice at the time, so night after night he would be subjected to the repeated entreaty "Kiel! A Rock!" so often that he came to believe (not really) that the voices in his head were ordering him to kill someone with a rock. Anyhow. He was quite good with the television talkback, so when Corey Haim and Corey Feldman were on rocking headscarves while flogging The Lost Boys, he had a good dumb-teen-mutter going on saying "So, we just want to look as much like Duran Duran as possible" and so on. Soon enough singer/songwriter Melissa Manchester came on, and she was reliably effusive as she told The Stories Behind The Songs. At one point the interviewer asked her to talk about A Very Special Backstage Visit She Had Recently Received, and she breathlessly related how a few months ago, after wrapping up a show on tour X in city X, and she's just relaxing in the dressing room area after Giving It Her All, and then someone taps her on the shoulder and she turns around and...

And here Kiel interjected, with a really perfect kind of affected-hip This Is So Awesome I'm Gonna Shrug It Off tone, "It was DeNiro." Which I hence always think of whenever someone's relating a celeb encounter anecdote in an unusually fraught way. In any event, in the case of the Manchester anecdote, I think the actual celeb was Stevie Wonder. 

More about Andrew

Ace compiler and commentator David Hudson, now doing his thing on Fandor, has been collecting all manner of excellent writings on the late Andrew Sarris, I recommend you go here and explore from there. 

I was honored when my friend Kent Jones asked me to contribute some memories of Andrew for a multi-contributor eulogy he was compiling for the Film Comment website. It just went up (David H.'s post was not updated to reflect this as I was composing this) and is here, and also contains wonderful short pieces by Kent, Geoffrey O'Brien, Phillip Lopate, and Robert Horton. So far. I have reason to believe more will be added. 

The current cinema, "More cowbell" edition

Roadie, about a washed-up one, for the Blue Oyster Cult yet, and starring Ron Eldard and Bobby Cannavale, sure could have used some, as I don't quite come out and say in my review for MSN Movies. 

Morgan, a suitable case for treatment

Come on, you'd use that as a headline too, if you could. Anyway. Over at MSN Entertainment, in commemoration of his upcoming feting at the Golden Globes, I give the once-over to Morgan Freeman and his screen career, citing ten of his best pieces of work in chronological order. Remember when he was a real badass bad guy instead of a kind of lordly suave bad guy, as in more recent work such as Wanted or (God spare you) Lucky Number Slevin? If you don't, you really need to check the man out in Street Smart, from back in 1987, in which he costarred with Christopher Reeve. Damn. 

Service advisory

Due to circumstances that at the time were beyond my control I have been compelled to remove the entire recent post pertaining to Carnage. In order to place circumstances back in my control, I have decided that from hereon in all comments will be moderated, and that this will be the case indefinitely. As most of the longtime readers here know, I prefer this not to be the case, and, well, I'm in too crappy a mood right now to say much more about it at this point. I'll be posting announcements of my remaining MSN Movies reviews over the next week and hope to finish the promised second installment of the Holiday Blu-ray "gift guide," but that's likely to be all until the New year. Thanks for your consideration.

Horrors

So guess which movie DIDN'T make it on to the "50 Scariest Movies of All Time" feature I compiled and write up for MSN Movies' Parallel Universe? Yup, that's right, Island of Lost Souls. It had to be that one. Because I'm a fucking idiot. In my defense, I've long held that it's not a REAL "greatest" list unless it complains at least one completely bone-headed and inexcusable omission, and the omission of Souls, I would say, constitutes a particularly distinguished instance of such. FML, as the kids say. But hey, you know what DID make the list—the movie featuring the image above, which is silent, for heaven's sake! So I've still got some integrity left. Or something. Oh well. Again, FML, but try to enjoy the list, if you will, and yes, I know, these galleries are a real computer pain-in-the-ass.

In other horror film developments, I saw Paranormal Activity 3 last night. In other reviewing developments, there's also Margin Call. 

The current cinema: "Sarah's Key"

So I was thinking of composing a post entitled " 'Theres' to which one really ought not go" in which I would take friendly but firm issue with Andrew O'Hehir's rather feckless speculation that maybe RKO had a point in mutilating The Magnificent Ambersons (a notion that one could say is almost too easy to disprove), and then pick apart certain points in Matt Singer's proposal concerning a critical parlor game for albums and its potential adaptation for films (extremely problematic in both cases, plus which, and this really can't be overstated, anyone who continues to promulgate the notion that "indie-minded filmmakers ike Steven Soderbergh take high profile gigs like Ocean's Eleven to off-set the costs of more personal projects like" blah-blah-blah literally does not know what he or she is talking about), but then I thought, hell, I'm still on ostensible vacation, I shouldn't even be reading this stuff let alone starting debates/fights over it, and so back to Catch-22 it is. (Can you believe I've never read it in its entirety before? Weird, right?) In the meantime, my review of Sarah's Key, which is really not bad as Holocaust-themed-pictures-with-Harvey-Weinstein's-name-attached-to-them go, is up at MSN Movies, and the wi-fi at my undisclosed location is such that I'm not gonna risk trying to put up a post as big as my July Blu-ray Consumer Guide, so see you some time Friday at the earliest...