Some Came Running

Hell/Carax/Tosches

There's nothing to win by
this sort of an outcry
Oh yeah we all know why

Cuz the world a person lives in
is his brain. Well mine just gives in...

—Richard Hell, "Who Says? (It's Good To Be Alive?)," from Blank Generation, Richard Hell And The Voidoids, SIre Records, 1977

Michel Piccoli, Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant, Mauvais sang, Leos Carax, 1986.

Denis Lavant, Holy Motors, Leos Carax, 2012.

In a recent comment the reader calling himself "That Fuzzy Bastard" expressed surprise/curiosity that Holy Motors was ranked so highly on my best-of-the-year list given the skepticism I expressed about it on first seeing it. As I mentioned in my first writeup, some of that skepticism was fueled in a reactive mode relative to Carax's Cannes 2012 status as the Approved-Creative-Fireworks-Wackadoodle of the Know-Somethingish American contingent of the festival attendees. Also there was some subsequent annoyance at self-satisfied predictions concerning a shift in the film's reception. 

A second viewing was, for me, more demonstrative of the movie's not just melancholy but its anger, its futile regret over a life badly lived because, in the immortal words of Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, "I got no choice!" As the ultimately nameless (I believe) actor played by Denis Lavant, once more I think acting for/as both himself and his director, goes through a day of demands and insults and winds up having to spend the evening with (spoiler alert) a family of chimps, if I'm not mistaken, the movie drives any number of sad and pissed-off stakes through The Imaginative Life As It Is Lived In These Times, but avoids (to use David Thomas' phrase) "I'm a miserable artiste, pity me!" special pleading, in part via a genuine empathy expressed through certain of the roles Lavant enacts. The imaginative life is not so far removed from what's referred to a the life of the mind after all. Unlike That Fuzzy Bastard, I came out not seeing "light, context-less emotion-tweaking" so much as a melange of modes and of alienated reactions to those modes, those reactions not making much of a dent in "reality" along the way. Yes, the green-suited "Merde" monster does succeed in disrupting a fashion photo shoot, but aside from a hard-on and a cigarette, what does it get him? 

Nick Tosches' latest novel, Me And The Devil, is a pretty problematic piece of work, but in the aggregate I have to say it left a mark, one that's not entirely segregated from the local anger that Tosches often expresses therein in a fashion many will take not unreasonable exception to. It's that kind of book, one where the acheivement seems in too-uncomfortable proximity to the things that make it objectionable. Where Holy Motors stumbles, it's in the realm of sentimentality (forgivable with respect to the movie's treatment of Edith Scob, less so in the It's A Wonderful Life-inspired talking-limos coda); Me And The Devil errs, as regular Tosches readers should not be surprised to learn, in the area of sort-of nihilist-tough-guy posturing. But it's not entirely purposeless. For instance:

Only an utter fool would rather express himself than simply be himself. To live was a beautiful thing. To write about it was a labor. And the pay had given way to pay cuts. 

Writing was not an act of imagination or, may the Devil take me for even using the word, creativity. (How I cringed when people used the word 'creative" in referring to me in my presence. I knew then and there that they did not know what work was. I knew then and there that they lived in a dream world. Often they themselves were make-believe "artists," living the "creative" life under the shelter of trust funds, inheritances, or family money of some kind. Often they were trying to imply an intimacy that did not, could not exist with me or what I did.) There was nothing to be romanticized in what I did. If flower garlands of words and phantoms of imagery had come to me in visions, so had some of the stupidest ideas I have ever had: ideas that landed me in jail, emergency rooms, or hock.

While Carax's film is a fantasy depiction of the working life of the artist, it is relatively unsparing in its depiction not just of toil but of emotional deprivation and loss. If it is a work of "creative" "exuberance" that exuberance is in a certain sense a gob of spit from the bowels of hell. 

Tosches again:

When I was young, I thought it would get easier. But as it turned out, each novel got harder. Maybe this was because, with each one, I was flaying a further layer from inside me, exposing yet another, deeper layer. Maybe this was what made it harder. When I was young and thought it woudl get easier—the days when I was thrilled to see my name or my picture on a book—I hid. I did not even dare to write in the first person. Then all that changed, and when it did, it reminded me of that sixteenth-century anatomical engraving by Amusco something-or-other, or something-or-other Amusco, the one of a guy stripped to his inner anatomy holding a knife in one hand and the drooping entirety of his body's own freshly removed skin in the other. 

The special knife, I thought as I recalled this: the special knife. Maybe I needed to write. Maybe, even with all the illness it brought, it was the least destructive, least dangerous alternative that I had. And I should be thankful that I had it. 

Every gift a curse, every curse a gift.

The golden age of inappropriate behavior in movie theaters

What follows below in a different typeface is excerpted from a post I wrote for my old blog at Premiere, "In The Company Of Glenn," apropos the opening of the I-still-think-rather-delightful motion picture Grindhouse. The post was called "My Grindhouse Days" and you can read the whole thing here. 

I’ve seen a lot of seedy movies in a lot of seedy venues in my time, but the so-called grindhouse that looms largest in my memory is the Plaza Theater, which occupied the corner of Union and Redwood Avenues in scenic Paterson, N.J. until it was demolished in 2001.

(Caution: "salty" language follows.)

I was introduced to The Plaza in the fall of 1977, shortly after I started attending William Paterson College, which was located in nearby Wayne. I had been taken under the wings of some of the older guys at the college paper, fellows who numbered bad movies as among their favorite things. Our little band’s ringleader, the late, great “Diamond” Don Markle, enjoyed nothing better than getting way stoned and, say, catching a 2 A.M. airing of They Saved Hitler's Brain on Channel 9.

Don sometimes rhapsodized about making his own exploitation flicks—his never-to-be epic Blue Water, White Kelvinator was to climax with the tossing of his old refrigerator over the nearby Paterson Falls. Back when Paterson was still a thriving industrial center, The Plaza was an art-deco gem. But by ‘77 Paterson was severely depressed, much of it a semi-urban slum. It was in such dumps that even its criminals were enervated—the one time I was mugged there, my “assailant” was a glue-sniffing hunch back who offered me a whiff of his paper bag, demanded my wallet after I demurred, and punched me quite lightly on the nose after I demurred again. And the Plaza had become a hole—I can’t recall the concession stand being open there, ever—that showed kung-fu triple features by day and horror/sexploitation double features by night. 

So naturally it became one of our favorite hangouts. The first bill we saw there, or so I recall, was Horror High and Dracula's Dog. Horror High was the real deal—trashy and stupid and inept as all get out, while Albert-Band-directed Dracula’s Dog (featuring Michael Pataki and a slumming Jose Ferrer) was dullsville in the not-so-grand Band tradition. A tradition I had little knowledge of at the time. (As far as the IMDB is concerned, though, I couldn’t have seen Dracula’s Dog when I remember seeing it, around Thanksgiving of ’77, as the IMDB places its release date as June of 1978. I can still hear Don, as plain as day, in his stentorian-announcer voice, heralding the glories of “Horrrrrur High AND DuuuuuhhhRRacula’s Daaawgg” which he absolutely could not have done in June of ’78, as by that time he was dead, killed by a drunk driver. Who got six months of license suspension, if I recall correctly. But, as we see, recollection can be a funny thing. And so can the IMDB.)

The following fall I moved into an apartment a block up from the Plaza, and forays became more frequent. Men of means by no means, my pals and I often found that a dinner of frozen ravioli followed by a joint followed by a walk down to the Plaza could constitute a cheap AND memorable night out.

It was there I saw Argento’s Suspiria for the first time, screened, in the fashion paid homage to in Rodriguez and Tarantino’s Grindhouse, with a full reel missing. The movie doesn’t make any more or less sense complete, incidentally. (And I still love it.)

But the Plaza was not regarded by most of its patrons as a place of discovery, a sacred vessel of cinema, or any such thing. More than once I saw guys walk in with blaring boomboxes perched on their shoulders—and they would leave them blaring in the aisle. The talking-back-to-the-screen was largely ubiquitous, and pretty consistently entertaining. One commentary during the middle of the appalling Nazi Love Camp Number 27—not to be confused with the appalling Love Camp 7—was particularly memorable.

In Nazi Love Camp Number 27, the young Jewish woman Hannah (played by the late Sirpa Lane, who previously starred in Borowczyk’s The Beast—if you have to ask, don’t) is forced into prostitution by the title, you know, Nazis, but before that, she’s in some kind of prison…and the corpulent lesbian warden of the place wants Hannah, but Hannah isn’t having it, the warden condemns Hannah to death, and at the execution site a Nazi captain’s there, and he sees Hannah, defiant to the end, spit in the warden’s eye, and this captain, who says he likes Hannah’s “spunk,” orders the warden to release Hannah into his custody. He takes Hannah home, stands her in front of a small, square, low-to-the-floor glass coffee table, and orders her to strip. She does. Hannah strips an awful lot in the movie, if I recall correctly. 

“And now, “ the captain says to her, “I vould like you to meet Axel!”

This was too much for the guys sitting behind us, who broke out into giggles.

“Axel!” one of them wailed. “That’s either his cock, or his dog!”

Yeah, could go either way. This Gestapo sicko was just the type to introduce a human female into his canine’s harem. Nicknaming his johnson seemed right up his alley as well.

In short order a big German shepherd, who could not have looked less interested, wandered into the frame. The actress playing Hannah feigned terror and started circling the tiny coffee table in a panic. The shepherd, finally taking his trainer’s cues, began to amiably chase the woman.

Again, the guys behind us were beside themselves, as were we. “Sheeeit,” one of them chortled, “my dog never had it so good!”

Anyway. Another story from the Plaza era involved my taking my girlfriend at the time to see Humanoids From The Deep. (Which is really, in its way, a pretty hot date movie.) In the middle of the film a couple of guys a few rows in front of us starting cursing each other out, resulting in the beginnings of something like a knife fight. Not much more than a few desultory swipes were exchange, but blades were unsheathed. The funny part was that somewhere during the middle of the exchange one of the gentlemen involved paused and looked up toward my girlfriend and said "Scuse the language, miss." No, really. 

I remember sometimes during the afternoon kung-fu triple features someone would come in carrying a boom box. Which would be left on. 

Some ten years later I went, with another crew, to a Times Square movie house to see a double feature of Bad Dreams and Brain Damage. Good stuff. In between the two movies there was a PSA in which Rae Dawn Chong tried to warn audience members off crack use. This actually served as a sort of mneomic to this guy sitting a few rows in front of us, who soon fired up his pipe. I don't know if Frank Henenlotter would approve of his work being consumed under such conditions. 

I bring all this up by way of apologizing for/rationalizing my inability to get what is apparently appropriately worked up about people texting during screenings. 

Class warfare the Robert Bresson way

The future 1%, probablement, circa 1983

"You know, I think it's about envy."—Mitt Romney, January 11, 2012

So I was watching this wonderful new print of Robert Bresson's final film, the magnificent L'argent, at Film Forum this afternoon, and as a peripheral mental exercise my imp brain started wondering what an American election-year conservative argument with the film might subsist of, and of course it would probably center, at least until the utterly non-negotiable ending, around protagonist Yvon's almost immediate turn to criminality once he loses his job, and of course around the notion that he actually gives up his job willingly, so to speak. That is, after the trial concerning the counterfeit notes (initially passed around by the teenage charmer seen above, and a buddy named Norbert) exonerates Yvon, the door is open for him to try to "explain" the situation to his former employers, but Yvon tells his wife that he's not about to go "crawling like a dog" to the bosses at the heating oil company. And this is the first of Yvon's sins: the sin of pride, and in case you have ever wondered why pride is considered a "deadly" sin, then, well, you absolutely ought to see this film. (Its run at the Film Forum, part of a fantastic Bresson retrospective, has its final day this Thursday, the 19th of January, but the Janus logo that opened the aforementioned wonderful new print—the screen cap above is from an old New Yorker Video DVD, made from less stellar material—indicates a Criterion edition of the film is in the future.) While Yvon's prideful gesture is easy to miss, it sets in motion all the further awfulness to come, but the point of including the gesture is not, I think, to condemn Yvon. Scenes coming a little after this show the ability of the film's better-off characters to pay off their sins, with money. The teen snot Norbert's mother buys the silence of the photo-store clerk who first took a fake 500 franc note with a discreet little envelope and a self-abasing (it seems) insistence; the punchline comes, of course, when the rich mom stands at the door expecting the clerk she's just bribed to hold it open for her. And of course the photo-store clerk rushes over to do exactly that. In this fallen world, money—"l'argent"—literally has the power to buy sin. And those without money have to work it off in other ways. Or maybe just sin more, and bigger. I imagine that when Mitt Romney talks about envy, there's a part of him that very deeply understands that that envy is not just over material goods, but also over a particular, um, standard of living. 

"The Iron Lady:" suggestions for an alternate soundtrack

Don't worry Katie

I imagine that some, but probably not all, of you out there may have gotten some amusement today from a Slate piece by the ever-reliable Katie Roiphe, ridiculously headlined "The 99 Percent Take Over Brooklyn," or from the subsequent Gawker mockery of said piece, more amusingly hedded "Katie Roiphe Saw A Fight." Roiphe's piece is a rather breathless account of a street altercation between apparently mostly youths of African-American origin, followed by Very Serious ruminations on what this all means. The piece is largely notable, as is usual for Roiphe, by the magesterial contempt it expresses for people who are pretty much exactly like Roiphe, only they don't write for Slate, unlucky them. But I write this piece not to offer mockery (much), but rather, an explanation and perhaps some consolation.

In the piece Roiphe describes "her" Brooklyn neighborhood as one lined with side streets that contain "coffee shops that sell $4.50 iced lattes made from something called 'Intelligentsia coffee.'" The Gawker piece mocks Roiphe for using scare quotes around the phrase about the coffee, but in fact Intelligentsia Coffee is more than a hoity toity concept, it's an actual brand, as you may see by clicking the link, and I've passed by the joint where they sell those lattes. As it happens, Roiphe is describing what is also MY neighborhood, how do you like that? And she's RIGHT, there has been a bit of an uptick in boisterous activity among the minority youth in that vicinity. And she has a THEORY about why.

"There are no messages. There are no demands. There are no signs made out of pizza boxes. But there is something about our untenable situation nevertheless making itself known."

Ah, Katie, dearest, I wish I could tell you that your pretty, soul-filled words tell some hard-won truth, but I'm afraid it's just not so. Here's what's going on: around May of this year, just as school had ended, the MTA shut down—didn't just stagger service at, didn't just schedule reduced hours for—actually shut down the Smith and 9th Street station serviced by the F and G subway lines. I remember when it was about to happen, and my wife and I were making small talk at the checkout of a local deli, and the owner was muttering unpleasant implications about what was gonna happen once "those kids" (and we had abolutely no doubt as to what he meant with that phrase) would be emptying out of/getting on the subway at the Carroll Street station (an entrance to which is seen in the above photo, that I took all by myself) instead of the place where they ought. "[Name redacted] is such a nice man, but that's kind of a racist thing to say," my wife said as we walked home. "Well, maybe it's not so much racist and more that he understands how large groups of young kids tend to act," I shrugged. "And anyway, haven't you seen Do The Right Thing?" 

The thing is, the deli guy wasn't precisely wrong. Right now there are grubby, nasty kids—of all races, really, I hasten to add like a good liberal—clotting up the streets in the afternoons in the ways they generally did not in this neighborhood ever since the school year ended. Quite a few of them are what any number of characters played by Eugene Levy on SCTV 90 would call "hoodlums." They don't give me much trouble, because I'm so AWESOME and I RELATE to them, no, actually because I'm tall, but they are pretty damn annoying and they do make nuisances out of themselves in/on any given retail outlet or street corner they opt to blight. They do not, from what I can glean, themselves have much concern with "our untenable situation." They seem more concerned with acting as if they're auditioning for a blackboard jungle iteration of Jersey Shore, I'd say. But I imagine that's just my own social prejudice talking. And if I find them annoying, just imagine how freaked out the residents of 320 Smith, the apartment monstrosity we tried to keep off my block (also seen in the above photo that I took all by myself) must be. Given that they're all more or less living here under protest (the rest of the neighborhood's, not theirs) (no really—when I'm out sometimes in the morning I swear I see most of the people who live there coming out with their hands over their faces like they're doing a perp walk or something), and now they've gotta put up with these yo-yos loitering in what is essentially the front of their home, the situation must be making some of 'em wonder how they can get whatever ridiculous money they've spent back. 

Me? I've been in Carroll Gardens since 1989, and I seen a lot of changes. I remember when on July 4th weekend you couldn't even walk ONTO, let alone UP Second Place for the literal blankets of firecrackers they started lighting up a full 48 hours before the holiday actually landed. Sounded like you were in Beirut, like they used to say. Almost scared my poor little kitty to death. Recently one of the local good, um, fellows, looked me up and down on the street and said, "You! You used to be one of the new guys. Now you been around so long, you're one of the old guys!" "Uh, yeah," I said. "Thank you. And thank you for, you know, not breaking my legs that one time." So all I know is that this, too, shall pass. Eventually, Katie, they'll be finished restoring or reconstructing the Culver viaduct, or whatever the hell it is they're working on, the Smith and 9th Street station will reopen, and for a lot of kids in an untenable situation their days of goofing off and screwing around in Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill will be over. Of course, I suppose had you given the matter a little thought, you might have been able to suss that out yourself, but then you would have been out one dopey Slate article and the no-doubt juicy fee you got for it. 

I am reminded of a story told me by an old friend, a journalist and itinerant musician who once played in a band fronted by Lucy Simon, Carly's older sister. One day after rehearsal (I gather this was some time in the 1970s), my friend was taking off, and he and Lucy were walking together. She asked him what he was going to do, and he said he was gonna grab the subway and go to X and meet a friend for something to eat, and Lucy said, "Oh, you're taking the subway?" and he said, "Yes," and why do you ask, and apparently Lucy got kind of sheepish and asked him if he had a subway token on him. He responded in the affirmative, and she got furtherly sheepish and asked him if she could see it. He assented, and she admitted that she had, in fact, never laid eyes on one before. 

A brief note on the advantages of maintained weight loss

So in the early evening yesterday I'm walking west on 49th Street in the Times Square area and I inadvertently cut into the path of a group of African American teen males  coming the other way. "Watch it, Bruce Willis," one of them says, chortling. "Nah, motherfucker looks more like Nic Cage," another one says, after passing. And all I can think is, well, beats the hell out of Victor Fucking Buono. 

A certain tendency in American genre cinema of the early 1970s (NSFW)

I'm sure some will think me a pig for even noticing it, let alone pointing it out, but sometimes a critic just has to stand up for what he believes in, and stuff. Anyway, like Warshow sez, "A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man." And for better or for worse, he might have added. So. I'm minding my own business last night, watching my new Warner Archive copy of John Flynn's 1973 The Outfit, a very good hardboiled picture adapted with some fidelity—not just to action and dialogue, but to a specific idea—from one of Donald Westlake/Richard Stark's Parker novels, and relatively late in the action the great Sheree North turns up, and it's all, like, "Hello!"...

She portrays the rather bored and somewhat, shall we say, slatternly wife of a redneck tough, and I'm remembering how early in her career North was posited as the new Marilyn Monroe, and I'm wondering, had Monroe not died, would she have been doing roles such as this one in '70s almost-B studio fare. And soon, North's character registers her boredom by coming on to Joe Don Baker, who's in this particular neck of the woods with Robert Duvall trying to buy a car with clean papers. There's a whole 'nother blog post could be written about another tendency in American genre cinema of the '70s, in which guys like Joe Don Baker could conceivably get lucky with women like Sheree North. But in any event...

Random observation

Breathes there a cinephile with sensibility so tame who never to him or herself hath said, "I like a cheesy sci-fi picture featuring a bunsen-burner rocket ship that has a special reservoir tip at the end?" I would hope not. 

The above is from the 1968 The Green Slime, which I'm getting soon from the Warner Archive and which DVD Beaver reviews here.

Thoughts on first hearing "Rill Rill" by Sleigh Bells

"Shit, man, do I still have the Thunderclap Newman album on my iPod? I don't? Shit. Where is that thing?"

Department of overextended analogies

Over at Vanity Fair's website, Julian Sancton makes the inevitable Funny People/Annie Hall comparison. Which is all well and good as far as it goes (and for a lot of Allen fans who think that Apatow's not fit to be Woody's chauffeur, it has to be said that it doesn't go very far at all), except Sancton makes some unfortunate know-something-ish assumptions as he pours in the analogy extenders. "And just as Allen did with such goofy farces as Sleeper, Bananas and Love and Death, Apatow amassed enough political capital in Hollywood to convince studios to allow him to spend it all on a more serious passion project."

Well, not to nitpick overmuch, but that "studios" ought to be singular. In either case. Apatow's feature directorial career has always been with Universal, and at the time of Annie Hall, Allen had an exclusive relationship with United Artists. (He had made his genuine directorial debut, Take The Money And Run, and his sort-of directorial debut, the Japanese-thriller mash-up What's Up Tiger Lily, for indie producers.) But Sancton's real distortions (which, I should point out now, are not nearly as egregious as, say, that bow-tied twit Roger Kimball's persistent slanders against Buñuel's L'age d'or, and which I do not bring up out of a desire to condemn Sancton, but merely because I think the differences between his suppositions and actual fact are kind of historically interesting) consist of the strong implication that Allen's comic work of the early '70s was a way of amassing "political capital" that he could cash in to do more ambitious work. 

This was never the case. Yes, Apatow's stupendous box office returns on The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up did help get Funny People made, but Allen's early, funny films, while all critically praised, were never box-office blockbusters. Allen negotiated his nascent film career in a way that no contemporary filmmaker could possibly emulate, for myriad reasons. But amassing "political capital" was never how he did it. Instead, he concentrated on gathering trusted collaborators on both the business and artistic ends—producers Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe, editor Ralph Rosenblum, who famously advised him to take the Bonnie and Clyde style massacre of hero Virgil Starkwell out of Money, and so on. And,  most importantly—and this, really, was what made it thoroughly unnecessary for him to amass "political capital"—he found himself a genuine corporate patron in the person of Arthur Krim (left), the head of United Artists from 1951 to 1978, a run that looks very impressive indeed in the executive revolving door era we're in today. Krim took Allen under his wing at the studio, and let him do pretty much as he pleased. One of the more amusing ironies of that early sequence of 1980's Stardust Memories in which Sandy Bates is tormented by the suggestions of young hotshot studio execs is that Allen himself hadn't been subjected to such humiliation in years, thanks to Krim.

"There were no readers' reports, no creative meetings, no casting approvals (unless informal, from Krim), no dailies, nothing but Woody and his script and his budget and Arthur Krim's blessing," writes former UA exec Stephen Bach in his ever-useful book Final Cut. Not that it was a blank-check deal. "One reason this worked as well as it did was that Woody's pictures always came in on budget, on schedule, and were what he said they would be." The filmmaker, Bach says, "had an old-fashioned, deeply ingrained sense of honor about his commitments," and Krim, it seems, matched it. It was Bach who was deputized with trying to keep Allen at UA after Krim went over to Orion in 1978. Allen followed Krim there, and retained a freedom few filmmakers ever enjoy—reshooting an entire film, September, in the late '80s when he was dissatisfied with the initial result. 

You don't see too many idiosyncratic film artists enjoying such protective, productive relationships with execs and/or studios today, do you? A few years back there was somebody at Warners who said, off the record, that they were gonna make Darren Aronofsky into their new Stanley Kubrick. And that idea kinda fizzled...not when The Fountain bombed, but when Brad Pitt left the project. Which should give you some inkling of the idea of commitment as it exists in today's Hollywood. It's worth remembering, then, remember that Woody Allen's emergence as an auteur owed as much to his alliance with an old-school Medici prince as it did to his own shrewdness.