Some Came Running

The first time I saw Carl Theodor Dreyer's "Vampyr"...

The old woman calls the shadow revels to an end...; Vampyr

...was on November 4, 1980. Election day of that year. I had come into Manhattan from New Jersey to spend some time with a pretty-much-former girlfriend (hope, although for what exactly I couldn't say, tending to spring eternal back then), on just what pretext I can't remember. She made some joke about keeping me out until after the polls closed—she was an avowed Reaganite and wanted some insurance for Jersey, or something.

Or maybe hanging out with the former girlfriend was a sidelight, and I had actually come into town to see Godard's Sauve qui peut, which was playing up at the Lincoln Plaza, and I enlisted the former girlfriend (I guess that about now I ought to dignify her with a name—Debra, it was) to come along on account as she was still pretty much the only person I knew in New York (aside from the Brooklyn Kennys) and she was interested in Godard in the way that many non-film/film studies majors at NYU were interested in Godard at the time, that is, kinda/sorta. I don't know.

The point is we wound up seeing three films that day. First, the Godard, which at the time, coming after such a long period of silence (his last picture to get any kind of meaningful exposure in the States had been Tout va bien in '72; of course he had been working, making video and film, the whole time of his putative exile from "commercial" cinema, but we just weren't seeing the work) was beautiful and strange; Godard the pop artist and agitator was gone, replaced by an elegiac post-classicist. I don't think that's how I actually put it to Debra as we walked down Eighth Avenue and into Times Square.

You stand accused of being Orson Welles

The talk here of The Dark Knight has, in comments, led to talk of the next really big superhero movie/graphic novel adaptation, Zack Snyder's Watchmen, based on the book by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons. Commenter Dan Coyle links to an Entertainment Weekly interview with Moore, in which his complete lack of interest in seeing what Snyder does to his work, and in having pretty much anything to do with Hollywood, is much-discussed. The gentlemanly Moore doesn't come off in the least bit churlish, sounding eminently reasonable and rather resourceful in having gotten to a place in his career where he need not deal with corporate interference of any kind, and good for him.

I was taken a little aback by an assertion in the lede of the piece (which is by my old Premiere colleague Nisha Gopalan, who must have been thrilled to do it; she's a graphic-novel adept from way back): "It's no surprise that Moore has been accused of being comics' Orson Welles — exceedingly talented, if profoundly prickly — and perhaps in certain incidents he's earned that description."

I have always thought that to be compared to Welles would be a major compliment. But what does it even mean to "accuse" someone of being like Welles? The facts on the ground, as opposed to the fabrications and suggestions of Kael's "Raising Kane," indicate that, whatever his quirks or weaknesses, Welles was more sinned against than sinning. "Profoundly prickly?" Are they talking about those radio ad outtakes where he criticizes the grammar of the copy? Again, whatever Welles' faults, he wasn't known for being particularly prima-donnaish on his own sets.

Left with no sensible explanation, one must conclude that the comparison speaks to a particular attitude, a determined, faux-reluctant resentment of the artist who won't play ball and needs a little chastisement. By invoking another putative maverick known for his tangles with the system, and implying that the tangles were the fault of the maverick rather than the system, the article is saying, "Boy, that Alan Moore. Talented guy, done some great stuff, but he should do himself, and us, a favor and just get with the program. Would it kill him to give his blessing to the Watchmen movie, maybe do a couple of scripts? He ought to turn that bearded frown upside down! Look, the President of DC says the company is still 'great fans of his work'!"

I dunno. I figure Moore's doing pretty well for himself, by himself.

As for Watchmen: It's been a while since I looked at the graphic novel—read it when the completed book first came out, in the late '80s. I was mondo impressed then. I thought, among other things, that it achieved (to steal a phrase from Robert Christgau) a complexity of tone that's pretty rare in any kind of art. And no way is Snyder going to be able to replicate or even simulate that. And Moore's particular brand of tragic/sardonic irony doesn't strike me as something Snyder or his collaborators are even able to grasp, let alone embrace. The trailer does look "impressive," though.

I ain't no joke(r)

My review of The Dark Knight—with concomitant musings on the state of our culture, just for fun!—is over at The Auteur's Notebook. Here are a couple of tastes: "This may seem like faint praise, but about the highest compliment I can give Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight right now is to say that there were many long stretches during which I didn’t even realize it was a superhero movie;" "Anybody who infers and then goes on to imply that [Ledger's] labors here somehow led to his death is slandering him in the worst way—by impugning his professionalism, for one thing."

The whole thing's here, and you can comment there or here. Enjoy!

Some notes on "Mamma Mia!"

Sophie's Choice: Seyfried (far right) sizes up three potential dads: from left, Skarsgard, Brosnan, Firth

1) Any film that asks us to imagine the comingled semens of Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard, and Colin Firth competing in the fallopian tubes of Meryl Streep ought to be at least slightly more compelling than this.

2) In terms of what we film snobs call mise en scene, this thing makes Across the Universe look like, erm, It's Always Fair Weather.

3) My Lovely Wife notes that just about every production number looks like something you'd see on the satellite music video channel they have on all the time at that Uzbeki restaurant in Queens.

4) Speaking of My Lovely Wife: Her and Colin Firth=Officially Over.

5) It would have been kind of cool if in that scene where Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) gets on the boat with her three probable fathers, she...no, I can't say it.

6) That dude Christine Baranski is mauling in the "Does Your Mother Know?" number—is that, like, Eddy Grant's grandson?

7) Wow, I really do feel kind of bad about all those nasty things I said about Across the Universe.

8) Boy, "S.O.S." sure is a catchy sumbitch, ain't it?

9) Anyone who slags Pierce Brosnan's vocal stylings in this picture clearly has not experienced the majesty of Oliver Reed in Tommy.

10) Actually, I've got to give Brosnan credit for trying, and for doing some homework—he applies the mannerisms of Mark Knopfler (and sometimes even Richard Thompson and John Martyn) to his gruff pipes, which is apt. Apt for his pipes. Not necessarily for ABBA songs.

11) Meryl Streep is demented!!

12) (SPOILER ALERT!!!!) It's kind of cute that Skarsgard ends up with Dudley Moore at the end. No, wait, that's Julie Walters.

13) My Lovely Wife, as it turns out, isn't all that familiar with Julie Walters. Attempting to sum up Walters' place in '80s cinema, I described her as "Emily Watson avant le lettre." That's pretty good. I think I'll use it some time.

14) I'll admit it: the "Waterloo" rendition in the end credits almost made the whole thing worth it.

15) I kind of want to have sex with Christine Baranski. Is that weird?

Department of I-guess-it-all-depends-on-who-you-talk-to

"Here come the warm ICBMs," Green Cine Daily's David Hudson drolly notes, anticipating the howls of outrage he believes will greet Stephanie Zacharek's review of Richard Brody's Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard in today's New York Times Book Review, in which, among other things, she responds to Brody's insistence that Godard's later work is deserving of critical reevaluation with an insistence that it is, well, not. So okay then.

Stephanie is a friend, and an admired colleague, and we know each other's aesthetic predilections pretty well, so I doubt she'll be surprised to learn that I take exceptional exception to many if not most of her points. But I'd rather debate her in person than harangue her from this perch. I will cite one bit from her review that I thought kind of funny, not in and of itself, but, well, you'll see. Recounting Brody's detailing of Godard's "rudeness" on various film sets, she invokes Jacques Rivette, saying his "filmmaking methods are better examples of the collaborative ideal of the '60s and early '70s. To make his 12-hour-plus epic 'Out 1,' Rivette gave his large cast of actors guidelines for creating their characters, and they wrote most of the movie's dialogue themselves."
That is true, as far as any of us who weren't there can tell. Still, when Kent Jones interviewed Out 1 actor Jean Pierre Leaud (pictured here in a scene from the film) in 1999, Leaud summed up his experience with Rivette thusly: "It was a very exciting adventure for a young man, but I wouldn't want to repeat it. I guess that the vampiric, sadistic methods that Rivette used to make that film were a part of the moment."

So, yes, sometimes it all depends on who you talk to. And also, with artists as with politicians, there are always pitfalls to judging them according to which one you'd prefer to have a beer with, or think you'd prefer to have a beer with.

Hmm. Inputting that just made me flash on these lines from The Dictators' immortal "Two Tub Man," perhaps the greatest approximate-rhyme heroic couplet ever written, to wit: "I'm just a clown walkin' down the street!/I think, Lou Reed is a CREEP!"

And it's true—Lou Reed IS a creep. But still...

The Fantastic Disappearing Rommel

At one point during his excellent commentary for the New Yorker Video edition of Robert Bresson's L'Argent, my friend Kent Jones takes a minute or two to lambaste what he calls a "ridiculous" onetime staple of Premiere magazine, a little box titled "Gaffe Squad" in which readers crowed about the continuity mistakes they discovered in both current and vintage films. Kent's rationale being that such gaffes pretty much have fuckall to do with the aesthetic worth of a picture and merely provide a somewhat meritricious method by which one can allow oneself to feel superior to a picture. Kent put it more eloquently than that, and I'm pretty sure he didn't use the word "fuckall." Anyway...since one is actually rendered incapable of "telling tales out of school" once a) most of said "school" has been bulldozed and b) you've been expelled from what portion of said "school" remains, I'll admit that I wasn't much of a fan of "Gaffe Squad" either, for reasons not dissimilar to Kent's. That's one of the reasons I thank God for the Internet: with the advent of such sites as MovieMistakes.com and such (what, you think I'm actually gonna link to it?), I could argue, as the print version of "Gaffe Squad" lay dormant, that online sites handled such things so much more briskly that it made no sense to revive it, much less move it into my beloved Home Guide section. And when such arguments stopped working, I just did my variant of the old "lalalalaicanthearyou" routine.

That isn't to say that there aren't some continuity gaffes out there worth noting. Some bring a kind of peculiar poetry or frisson to an otherwide ordinary film. And THAT isn't to say that 1962's The Longest Day is ordinary. I've been fascinated by this film forever, largely because, for all the drama of the event it depicts (that would be D-Day, World War II, y'all) the movie is so peculiarly scrupulous that it contains practically no drama. It's an environmental picture with big stars; it's not so much the percursor to Saving Private Ryan as it is a peer to Andy Warhol's Empire. (Incidentally, just as I would love to screen Todd Haynes' I'm Not There for a teen who has no idea who Dylan was, I'd love to get a reaction to Day from someone who's never heard of Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Richard Burton, et al. Don't kid yourselves; there are such people out there.) If Douglas Gordon had real conceptual cojones, he'd have forged a 24-hour version of this film rather than Psycho.

But I'm getting away from my point, which is the gaffe. It's a pretty spectacular one, occuring only about five minutes into the film. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Werner Hinz)—you know him—is looking out at the English Channel, and musing. It's a rear projection shot—Hinz is standing in front of a screen. So, anyway, he's musing, in German, as we see below:

...and then all of a sudden he just disappears—but keeps on talking, contemplating the mere strip of water separating England from the blah blah blah.

The shot continues for several seconds, with Rommel continuing to muse.

This is such a blatant error that one could convince oneself it was deliberate. As in, "what a remarkable artistic coup on the part of German director Bernhard Wicki, to drop in this blatant demonstration of Rommel's supernatural powers, and then never make reference to them again for the rest of the film!" Watching the remainder of The Longest Day under that particular spell could be the cinematic equivalent of reading Pierre Menard's version of Don Quixote.

"Hancock" and the Babel of comic-book myth (contains putative spoilers)

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a drunk who can lift cars!...

"Wall-E"

I do love Wall-E, I really do. It's just that the love is not unconditional. I explain in my review at The Auteur's Notebook.

Moral abhorrence conveniently redefined...

Some clod over at the blog for The New Republic has anointed M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening "The Most Morally Abhorrent Film Ever Made," on account of the fact that it posits that "the mere existence of the human race is a cause for great shame."

I haven't seen the film, but if I recall my philosophy classes correctly, the above proposition is more a matter of moral negation than moral abhorrence. Maybe. Whatever. Still, I, and thou, and all other occasional-or-not connoisseurs of what we'll term less-than-above-board genre films should take Mr. James Kirchick's mildly hysterical pronunciation to heart. Just think of all the other movies now off the hook! (For one thing, Roger Kimball will have to look into giving up his mendacious attacks on L'Age d'Or !)

Should I find myself in a frame of mind to check out Cannibal Holocaust or Avere vent'anni, I can do so with the intellectual confidence that, hey, it's not that bad. Should My Lovely Wife enter the room during the harrowing denoument of the latter film, involving a thick tree branch and an upside-down naked woman, and express her entirely understandable repellence, I can just shrug and say, "You know, it's not as bad as The Happening." Sweet.

Contemplating Coffin Joe

One of the most entertaining essays in the below-mentioned collection Exile Cinema is Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin's ecstatic appreciation of Brazilian horror auteur Jose Mojica Marins and his cinematic alter-ego Ze de Caixao (Coffin Joe). (Maddin, incidentally, has the unique distinction of being both a contributor to the book and one of its subjects.) Good cinematic fetishist that he is, he gets himself into a right tizzy over Mojica's, or maybe Ze's, lower lip (before comparing it to a liver): "...resting easy as it does on those coarse black chin whiskers, fat and satisfied like a satiated cutworm or like the vulva of a woman who's been quite willingly stuffed into a hyper-realistic cow costume and rolled into a busy bullpen."

Yowsah.

And as you can see from the screen grab above, from 1964's seminal, and how, At Midnight I'll Take Your Corpse, that lip is a formidable sneer instrument.

So imagine my slight shock when, around 1994, on encountering Mojica/Ze in the flesh, I found him an almost ...avuncular figure.