Some Came Running

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: "Margin For Error/A Royal Scandal"

This BFI two-disc set is quite the nifty package for the would-be Preminger completist who's not overly troubled by the varied vicissitudes of the current global economic situation. Error is the pumped-up-for-wartime 1943 adaptation of a (by all accounts lousy) 1939 Claire Booth Luce play. Preminger directed and costarred in the Broadway version, playing the slimy New-York-stationed German counsul. He agreed to reprise his role for the Fox film version, however, only in exchange for the opportunity to direct. This machination allowed him to relaunch a film career that had foundered in the wake of a feud with Fox chief Daryl F. Zanuck. For that reason alone, Error is an important film.

Other extra-diegetic points of interest include the above-pictured Preminger's pin-prick sharp performance, in which, among other things, he trades barbs with future "Uncle Miltie" Milton Berle, here playing a Jewish cop reluctantly safeguarding the German embassy. Said barbs, with Berle mouthing a lot of patriotic New-Yawkisms, were largely crafted by Preminger and young Samuel Fuller, a Preminger discovery.

Eventually a convoluted whodunnit with a wrapup that wouldn't satisfy the most perfunctory Ellery Queen reader, Error is also replete with blackmail, sexual and otherwise, and speculative trading in human life...pretty squalid stuff, were it allowed to register. But this dish is garnshed with so much wartime propaganda corn that one barely notices the manifestations of evil that we're supposed to be warring against. As Chris Fujiwara notes in his recent critical biography of Preminger, Error is "earnest and empty, surprising and eerie in its hollowness." As the screen cap above attests, the BFI disc of it looks pretty damn good.

1945's A Royal Scandal is another anomaly, a would-be Lubitsch film (indeed, its title card calls it "Ernst Lubitsch's 'A Royal Scandal'") whose direction was taken over by Lubitsch's friend and apostle Preminger after Lubitsch health disallowed him from helming the film. A comic treatment of the loves of Catherine the Great, it stars stage legend Tallulah Bankhead in one of her infrequent screen turns.

Contempt for the audience!

James McAvoy, no longer "ordinary and pathetic," in Wanted.

I understand one usually has to wait for the third occurrence of something in order to speculate about that something becoming a trend, but let me jump the gun here. One of the sole memorable moments of Doug Liman's spectacularly misbegotten Jumper earlier this year came right at the beginning, as the title character (you're not going to actually make me look up his name, are you?), who can globe-hop limitlessly through sheer force of will and who we first see here standing atop Egypt's Sphinx, gives a voiceover description of his day—€”breakfast in Paris, getting "digits" from "this Polish chick" (Jesus), and so on. Wow, he's so cool. And as we ease into the flashback, he says, "I wasn't always like this. Once, I was a normal person. A chump, just like you."

The insult was all the more irksome in that it emanated from the lips of pouty/smirky non-acting dipshit Hayden Christensen (just how was Billy Ray able to get that performance out of him in Shattered Glass? maybe worminess just comes to the guy naturally or something?), but I shrugged it off—I'm didn't pay to see your dumbass movie, pretty boy, so eat it. But seriously. I know that superheroes are supposed to be envied by their audiences—€”although I do dearly hope that even the most avid consumers of this sort of material understand that superheroes actually cannot be envied—but this particular take on the practice of bringing a little excitement into our humdrum lives seemed gratuitously smug. I could riff on gratuitous smugness in Hollywood and Hollywood product until the cows come home,but I need to stay on topic here.

Yesterday I did pay money to see Wanted, which has a similar voiceover line, this one coming at the end rather than the beginning, and intoned by rather-more-skilled performer James McAvoy, playing a onetime milquetoast accountant who is now an assassin nonpareil (happens all the time). "Six weeks ago, I was ordinary and pathetic, just like you."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," I thought. "I've met you, James McAvoy, and basically you barely come up to my waist. Watch it, fucker." I know, I know—€”McAvoy's playing a character here. Still. What is this bullshit? Have screenwriters become so defensive/resentful on account of churning out quasi-nihilistic, faux-convoluted, graphic-novel-mytho-Babel tripe like this that they feel compelled to lash out at the audience that laps their nonsense up?

If so, they should understand that audiences don't quite lap it up in the way they might think. The 2:50 show at the Court Street Regal yesterday was pretty packed; my vibe on the crowd was that it was composed of folks who were interested in seeing a bright shiny noisy thing, and nothing but. I see my friend Jeffrey Wells is bemoaning " younger males" whose "appetite for brutish ultra-violent degeneracy is alive and thriving," but the one-man control group for this crowd, far as I could tell, was the middle-aged African-American gentleman sitting behind me whose running commentary consisted of variations of "Shit is crazy" and "She looks good." Although the one bit of dorsal nudity from Angelina Jolie, the she in question, elicited a "She needs to eat something."

For all its crassness, the picture is rather surprisingly affectless; and for all its putatively adrenaline-pumping fast-slow-fast-slow breakneck-the-laws-of-physics action, rather no big deal, leaving the audience impressed with its bright shine and noisiness, but hardly stirred or stirred up. Hence, McAvoy's "ordinary and pathetic" crack, and the punchline that followed, didn't register overmuch, getting merely pro forma chuckles. Because the crowd never believed in any of this for a minute. Just a bright shiny noisy thing in an air-conditioned room. Anybody wants to pat himself on the back on account of maybe being responsible for getting folks to shell out money for such a thing oughtn't strain his arm too much.

"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.

Hello, sailors

There's a perception out there that critics in general, and film critics in particular, are a herd of snooty, pinkie-in-the-air, latte and/or martini swilling elitists who enjoy nothing better than getting together and laughing at ordinary hard-working Americans. Well, I'm here to tell you: we drink beer just like everybody else. Only it's European beer, get me?

You might be wondering what I'm getting at. Truth to tell, I'm wondering what I'm getting at myself.

Okay, there's a story from Cannes that I've been wanting to tell, but didn't want to tell without evidence in hand. Now that it's in hand—or, rather, on desktop—I will spill.

En attendant Breillat

Let it never be said that I am the sole member of the Kenny household who gets wound up over certain movie writers/writing. Somehow, My Lovely Wife has gotten herself on the e-mail list of a site called Women & Hollywood (sample post excerpt: "What's interesting is that while high brow critics on the one hand berate the low art of Sex and the City, they also validate its success precisely because the conversation about Top Girls and its cultural implications would not be happening had Sex and the City not been the success it is. Sex and the City is a change making movie," boldface in original), and every week, like clockwork, I get an e-mail from My Lovely Wife fuming about the sheer tunnelvisioned banality contained therein.

"You're going to love this one, particularly the paragraph on Catherine Breillat, from this woman who claims to be so dedicated to women in film," MLW e-mails me this morning. The graph in question:

Also on tap this weekend is French director Catherine Breillat's new period piece The Last Mistress in limited release. Having missed the screening I can't give any assessment and I am embarrassed to admit that I have never seen one of her films. I have added her to my netflix list and will be hopefully catching up on her work.

While I never cease to admire My Lovely Wife's feistiness, I can't work up much of a froth of indignation about this. Even many putatively enlightened and/or "edgy" feminist critics (I'm not gonna name names, it'll only get me in trouble) would prefer to engage Nancy Meyers over Lizzie Borden, Madonna over Diamanda Galas. Breillat is a marginalized presence but she does get more attention than others on account of both the relative accessibility (most of her pictures are linear narrative) and the putatively sensational content of her works.

That said, I would love to see the followup report from the proprietor of Women & Hollywood. I'm only hoping that she doesn't do 2002's relatively subdued Brief Crossing right off the bat. Because just about any other Breillat picture is likely to make this writer's head explode.

I'm thinking of the chicken-plucking scene in Une Vraie Jeune Fille. Hell, I'm thinking of any scene in Une Vraie Jeune Fille. The finale of A Ma Soeur (Fat Girl). The tea-brewing in Anatomy of Hell. Even the non-explicit stuff, like Annie Parillaud's psychological machinations in Sex is Comedy, are of the stuff that is not dreamed of in Women & Hollywood's philosophy. I eagerly await some verdicts.

Speaking of Breillat and chicken, incidentally, I think the tone of The Last Mistress is definitively set in the opening scene, in a shot in which the Count of Prony (the ever great Michael Lonsdale) bites into a chicken leg so shocking pink you believe that in the next scene he'll be pronounced dead of salmonella. Indulgence and fleshly rot in one pithy, queasy moment. If you're wondering, I do adore the film.

A (weak) defense of Entertainment Weekly's "The New Classics" lists (Updated)

Rivette's Histoire de Marie et Julien: not even nominated, most likely.

Let's begin with a fundamental fact: lists are bullshit. Lists are such blatant bullshit that any magazine person will admit to you that they're bullshit. Some might need to have had a couple of drinks first, others might be more effectively cajoled by having you complain for the millionth time in the course of a conversation about how your own favorite cultural artifact was left off some list or another, but they'll admit it. Furthermore, even lists purportedly based on data and research and objective standards are, at some level, bullshit. That U.S. News and World Report annual list of America's best colleges? Guess what.

Another thing: the bigger and more putatively comprehensive the list, the greater the intensity of bullshit. I should compare this to decibel measurement, wherein each individual decibel represents ten times worth of increase. This is worth remembering when considering that Entertainment Weekly's June 27/July 4 double issue, "The New Classics," purports to present "The 1000 best movies, TV shows, albums, books and more of the last 25 years."

But let's not get ahead of ourselves quite yet. "Glenn," I hear you asking, "if lists are such bullshit, why do magazines and websites do them almost all the frickin' time?"

Well, because lists are putatively "fun." People notice them, argue about them. They take them fairly seriously, pretty much regardless of what their sources are...oddly enough. For a magazine in particular, a list is a potential goldmine of publicity. It gets your product noticed. TV news, radio outlets, they LOVE lists.

Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Brasillach, and Anti-Semitism: Some observations (updated)

Phillippe Loyrette recites the work of "the James Dean of French fascism" in Godard's Eloge de l'amour, 2001.

The first mention of Bobert Bressilach in Richard Brody’s near-exhaustive Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard occurs on page six, as Brody describes the pro-Vichy and anti-Semitic leanings of Jean-Luc Godard’s family: “The days of [Vichy propaganda minister and Milice member Phillipe] Henriot’s assassination (in 1944) and of the execution of Robert Brasillach, the right-wing critic and novelist and anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi propagandist (in 1945) were days of mourning in the Godard house.”

This mildly queasiness-inducing passage turns out to be a prelude; after Brody’s absorbing, astute, oft-harrowing accounts of Godard’s oft-harrowing marriage to/collaboration with Anna Karina, Godard’s sometimes bizarre radicalization, semi-retirement, his video work, partnership with Anne Marie Mieville (which accounts feature material even more off-putting, perhaps, than what I’m gonna get into here, but that’s for another post or, more likely, another writer), Brasillach returns, in a somewhat odd manifestation:

In the mid-1990s, a young Parisian writer, Philippe Loyrette, made a film in which a friend videotaped him chanting, in psalmodic incantation, the poetic “testament” written by the fanatically anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi French writer Robert Brasillach in 1945 while awaiting execution, for collaboration, in a prison cell near Paris. Loyrette sent a copy of the tape to Godard.

The tape impressed Godard enough that Godard himself made a short film based on it, with Godard reading a self-composed text in a manner similar to Loyrette. And in 2000, Godard invited Loyrette to act in Eloge de l’amour, playing the assistant to struggling artist Edgar (Bruno Putzulu); in the scene depicted in the above screen cap, Loyrette is giving a “correct” reading of Brasillach’s text—part of which goes “Neither tenderness nor courage are things a court can rescind”—after Edgar upbraids the seated actress who had given it a go.

The noble business about things courts cannot rescind is at the very least pretty unexceptionable. Less than a year earlier (August 1944), considering the prospect of hiding out in liberated Paris to avoid capture and trial for aiding the Germans, Brasillach cracked wise in his diary: “Jews have lived in cupboards for nearly four years. Why not imitate them?”

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: "Hiroshi Shimizu Film Collection Volume One: Landscape"

At a symposium on films and film criticism held last fall in Brookline, Massachusetts, the great critic and essayist Phillip Lopate, in the middle of an eloquent and inarguably correct disquisition against narcissistic '70s nostalgia and for a film history that privileges beauty and integrity over "edge," allowed that he now preferred films that had "something to do with humanity" to any other pictures. While fully respecting that perspective, the genre aesthete in me had to raise a hand in favor of putative genre formalists (I think Mario Bava came up).

Which is not to say I object to pictures that have something to do with humanity. I just like films that offer something to do with humanity in ways I haven't seen. And it's true that such films can be found in all periods—but alas, these days, you're more likely to find the most eloquent and startling expressions and explorations of humanity in the films of the past. Such as, say, Toni, the Renoir picture released by Masters of Cinema and featuring a commentary by Phillip and Kent Jones, which I reviewed here.

All of which is a roundabout way of offering an unqualified recommendation for this first box set of the work of Japanese director Hiroshi Shizumi, who lived from 1903 to 1966, directed for 1924 to 1957, was admired by Ozu and Mizoguchi, loved to take his camera on the road instead of setting it down in a studio...and who seemed to live to provide notes and images of humanity that always surprised with both their truth and artistry.

Oh, why the hell not?

See here.

As a regular reader of LGM, I was present at the birth of this particular meme. It was strangely satisfying, I must say...

More "Gang" Activity...

I'm happy to announce that I've joined the terrific crew of writers over at The Auteurs' Notebook—not that I'm abandoning my post here, mind you. My first piece for the site just went up—some notes on the putative surrealism of long time fave The Gang's All Here, with the added bonus of some reminiscences about the shooting of the film from then-Benny-Goodman-Band-drummer (he was all of 19 at the time!) Louie Bellson. It's a fun piece, if I may say so myself. The disembodied head of Eugene Pallette commands you to go to this link and read it!