Some Came Running

My Twelve.

Had my pal Bill tagged me with this meme—twelve hard-to-see films you haven't seen, which has kind of morphed into twelve films you haven't seen but ought to have seen, period—ten years ago, when I first became chief film critic at Premiere, he would have gotten a lot more jaw-droppers out of me than what you're going to find below. Yes, I was an avid "film buff" with a pretty wide-ranging knowledge. But I had not yet seen, at that time, Only Angels Have Wings. That's right. Not to mention To Have and Have Not. Or Make Way For Tomorrow. I took the job pretty seriously—as Roger Daltrey sang, "I get my BACK into my living"—and one of the first things I applied my leisure time to back then was plugging up the aforementioned holes, and others.

A lot of people I socialize think I know everything about movies, but I'm strictly Triple A league compared to guys such as Kent Jones and Dave Kehr, to name only two colleagues who are also friends. I was chatting with Kent recently and the Michael-Curtiz-directed Al Jolson vehicle Mammy came up; I, with a certain ostentatious confidence, pronounced it Curtiz's worst film. Kent wrinkled his brow, said "Well..." and reeled off three titles, one a film I had forgotten, two, films I hadn't seen.

Still. When putting this list together I had a bunch of books by my side; going through Jonathan Rosenbaum's "1000 Favorites" appendix in his wonderful Essential Cinema, I gave myself a little pat on the back. The odd extremely early Ozu and a couple of the films cited below aside, I found I was keeping up with one of the most thoroughly-knowledgeable-American-film-critics-ever fairly nicely. So my life hasn't been wasted.

Of course, a cinephile's work is never done, and a film critic's learning curve never goes down. So. In no particular order.

1: Seven Footprints to Satan, 1929, Benjamin Christensen
Ever since I first read Carlos Clarens' An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films back when I was ten or so, I've made a project of trying to see every single film cited therein. With the exception of the lost ones, which, you know, nobody can see. I've done all right. Out of the 350 or so pictures listed in that book's appendix, I'm missing fewer than fifteen of the ones that actually still exist. Yep, I've seen the 1933 earthquake movie Deluge—albeit in an Italian-dubbed print. You do what you have to. In any case, this picture, the fifth American picture by Danish director Christensen (whose 1922 Haxan is another horror classic) was long considered lostbut is now not, and yet I have failed to keep up with it. It's not on DVD yet. Also, those would appear to be seven stairs to Satan, not seven footprints. The swell rock combo Luna actually made this correction on a song title on its album Days of Our Nights.

2: These Are The Damned, 1963, Joseph Losey
Another one I read about in Clarens. "The picture is one of the most lucid in Losey's career, and one of his most accomplished. The director...here achieves a fine balance between the elucidations of the obvious and the enlightenments of the subtle." Plus, Oliver Reed is in it. Given that this has shown up on TCM recently in a longer print than has previously been seen in the U.S. (which print inspired the great Tim Lucas to new critical height on his Video Watchdog blog), my only excuse now for not having seen this is a pretty pathetic one, centered around my laxness in keeping tabs on TCM's schedule.

3: Illusion Travels By Streetcar, 1954, Luis Bunuel
You happy now? I'm sure I've cited Bunuel as my favorite director on more than one occasion, and yet, here it is. A comedy from his Mexican period, now considered sufficiently canonical that a very good new film blog is named for it. One of the reasons I hesitated in accepting this tag is that I feared it would be expensive—that, as I uncovered certain gaps, I would feel compelled to fill them, with no regard for good sense. Hence, there's what I'm quite certain is going to be a wretched DVD of this film in my Amazon shopping cart even as we speak. Aaargh.

On getting tagged

It began pretty recently, so I'm not going to moan along the lines of "when was he gonna get around to telling us," but out feisty and knowledgeable commenter who goes by only "bill" has started a blog, and it looks to be a winner. It's called "The Kind of Face You Hate," after a classic line from the once-obscure avant-noir Blast of Silence, and it has a particular emphasis on horror pictures and crime fiction, both of which are better than all right by me.

In less delightful news, the man also known as Mr. R has "tagged" me with a "meme," by which I am required (well, not required, but it would be overly churlish to refuse, as those of you familiar with all internet traditions would know) to list and describe 12 movies I haven't seen. I was hoping to get a little downtime this weekend, but no...

Something ought to go up reasonably soon. In the meantime, the still here is from one of the twelve. Do you know what it is?

The "Coppola Restoration" Letters: Postscript

Making his bones in this town while you were banging cheerleaders. If, in fact, you were banging cheerleaders. We kind of doubt it, actually.

"The Coppola Restoration" of the three Godfather films is a major salvo in a battle that won't be settled any time soon. The battle over how classic cinema should look on high-definition video. And this has an impact even on those who don't have a Blu-ray player and don't intend to get a Blu-ray player, because pretty much all mastering of film to other media is being done in high-def and then down-converted to standard def NTSC for "regular" DVDs. It's a high-def digital world and the tools available to both moviemakers shooting in video and technicians putting older films into home entertainment formats are almost magical. Potentially dangerous.

Gordon Willis, Allan Daviau, and Robert A. Harris drew a line in the sand with their restorations of the first two Godfather films. They used the digital tools to present the films as they were shot and printed. No messing with the grain of the film stock (or "grain-rape," as Jeffrey Wells rather, um, infelicitously puts it). Maintaing the four-points-yellow-one-point-red above-normal processing. Keeping those blacks—actually unexposed parts of the negative!—black. Keeping the nearly blown-out whites of the wedding sequence blaring. And so on. A bold statement. I agree with it. (And, more importantly, I enjoy the result.) Others don't. Some are kinda confused.

More statements are coming. Disney's first Blu-ray of a classic animation title, Sleeping Beauty, comes out in October. It was done at Lowry Digital, with a process I'll detail in a forthcoming Popular Mechanics feature on High-Def. (Which I'll alert you to and link to when the time comes.) A very discerning fellow critic who saw a Disney-sponsored preview demo of selected scenes (as I did) used the same word Kay used to describe her marriage to Michael in sizing up the results of the restoration. I'm reserving judgment until I see it in a theater, and after that on a properly calibrated home display. (At demos they tend to pump up the brightness on the displays to pretty much unconscionable levels.) In November come Criterion's first Blu-rays. The range of the first eight titles shows they're eager to strut their stuff in a lot of modes, from the lustrous black-and-white of The Third Man to the ravishing color of The Last Emperor to the altogether more funky and impressionistic stylings of Chungking Express.

Should be a very interesting Fall.

Shorter Dana Stevens

"Dead People Are irritating", Slate:

Joe Six Pack's inability to get Ricky Gervais makes me ashamed to be an American.

The "Coppola Restoration" Letters, Part Three; or, "Friends of Italian Opera"

To: Glenn Kenny
From: Joseph Failla
Sept. 18, 2008, 3:31 a.m.

G,
I agree, with the first go round with the Godfather films on DVD in 2003 we were left wanting, so these new editions should be more highly anticipated than rhose recent "upgrades." Since Godfather III was made so much later, it dosen't seem to be in need of the extensive restoration effort that went into the first two.

Although it wasn't necessary, Godfather III was still the film everyone wanted to see made with the possible exception of Coppola who struggled for years to find a satisfying concept (it would be interesting to see a list of rejected ideas before they settled on Vatican intrigue). But the main problem for me is I no longer recognize the characters as the same ones from the previous movies. Michael Corleone asking for redemption is not credible after the willing self destructive choices he makes in the first films. He becomes so insulated (submerged if you will) from any kind of human feeling at the end of Part II, much like the predicament Charles Foster Kane finds himself in; there's no going back.

Many of the dramatic high points of Part II are also muted in the third, with character arcs that continue in very unlikely ways. Regarding Michael and Kay; when he slams the door shut on her, it's with a finality that ends their relationship permanently. How would Michael ever forgive Kay for what she did to their unborn Sicilian child? And speaking of children, it was clear they were under his control, but now they rebel whenever possible. Was son Anthony's only other option to a life in crime to become an opera singer? And what of Connie? Over the course of three films she goes from daddy's little girl, to lush, to dragon lady. The death by poison cannoli sequence is a low point. Part II survives without Castlellano's Clemenza, but attempting a Godfather film without Duvall is a serious error. And Pacino's oft quoted line "Just when I thought I was out..." didn't become quite the catch phrase it was intended to.

But I've got to admit, even though it asks a lot, if I watch Godfather III separately from the first two it seems like less of a belated curtain call, and gains some stature as a decent later period Coppola film. It has more in common with the type of films he was making at the time (The Cotton Club, Peggy Sue Got Married, Tucker), than the 70's classics it refers to by name. It's looser, played broader and is more ambiguous, coming off like one of Michael Corleone's brooding daydreams, rather than fact. Like a character says in a Sopranos episode, "Godfather, I've seen that movie two hundred times. Godfather II, was definitely the shit. The third one... a lot of people didn't like it. But I think it's just misunderstood."

Joe

To: Joseph Failla
From: Glenn Kenny
Sapt. 18, 2008, 7:58 a.m.

Joe,

I've seen Part III twice, first in a theater and again on the 2003 DVD, and always found it perched halfway between an embarrassment and a peculiarity, if you will. Some of the impassioned defenses of the film that popped up in the comments section of our last exchange encouraged me. Maybe a look at the film with fresh eyes will show me something new, I thought.

Things got off to a reasonably good start. The picture looks good. It's interesting to see cinematographer Gordon Willis using new tools—finer-grain film, for instance. He's still going for that dark, burnished look, and I suspect that in this case he could often get it without having to push the equipment to its limits. Tellingly, Part III us barely mentioned in Emulsional Rescue, the well-done mini-doc about the restoration that's one of this package's extras. So I presume it didn't need much work.

So, anyhow, there I'm watching, and there's Sofia Coppola, and no, I don't think she's "that bad." There's something very natural and endearing about her awkwardness, to the extent that one can believe that what she's giving is in fact a realized performance. Also, I'll admit it, I thought she was absolutely hot. Oh, dios mio, the eyes, the lips...

But soon enough my troubles began again. I'll tell you exactly when. It's when Diane Keaton delivers the deathless line, "You know, Michael, now that you're so respectable I think you're more dangerous than ever."

The "Coppola Restoration" Letters, Part Two

"You talk to my father about my future?"...

From: Joseph Failla
To: Glenn Kenny
Sept. 17, 2008, 1:58 a.m.

G,
It was my experience, in catering to many home theater enthusiasts at my job dealing laserdiscs and dvds, that the emphasis was clearly placed on the hardware, or better put, how a movie would perform on their home video systems. As opposed to how faithful a video reproduction of the movie it was. Which is not to say I didn't have customers who were discerning film collectors, I would enjoy a good amount of inquiring film talk on an almost daily basis by those looking for classics, foreign, cult and little known gems in order to enhance their video libraries.

However, there was a select group of buyers who, in order to get the most out of their very expensive home systems, steered their purchases to films that were geared to deliver the obvious goods (a prime example would be Gladiator, a mediocre film but a stunning home theater experience). Much the same way some folks look at their car as something to show off, rather than a vehicle to take them back and forth to work. It's the rare customer who buys a video system that doubles as a status symbol in order to watch Grand Illusion or L'Avventura.

In the case of the Godfather films, there is much crossover appeal in that certain home theater owners may feel their collection not complete without them but—won't necessarily appreciate a retro-restoration job that returns the films to their original 1970's appearance. Many buyers simply expect across the board picture and sound brilliance that dosen't suit all presentations. Someone once told me he found fault with the most recent Sony Taxi Driver dvd because it didn't play as bright or sharp as other more recent titles he owned. It looked "like a '70s movie," he complained.

Since the Godfather restorations were placed in the hands of their cinematographer Gordon Willis, and given his diligence to reproduce the films exactly as he shot them over thirty years ago, there should be no contesting the final results. Now, if he could just be called in to oversee new transfers of the extraordinary work he did for Woody Allen around the same time, we can start this discussion all over again...

—Joe

From: Glenn Kenny
To: Joseph Failla
Sept 18, 2008, 7:20 a.m.

Joe—

Ah, home theater. Where would guys like us be without it? You might remember, some 20-odd years ago, when I was working at Video Review, and we tested the very first home surround sound system? This massive contraption from Shure Brothers, the microphone guys, that had not one, but three heavy amplifiers? First thing we tried out on it when we set it up at the office was, of course, a laser of 2001. At the official demo in L.A. a couple months earlier, the big set piece they wanted us to hear was that repellent "Oh, Yeah" scene from The Secret of My Success.

I hated yuppies back then, too...

But back to the Godfather stuff, we should remember that one of the factors that spurred on this "Coppola Restoration" was the fact that the initially much-bruited first round of Godfather DVDs back in 2003 were deemed kind of a botch.

The "Coppola Restoration" Letters, Part One

Above: Your Godfather moment of Joe Spinell...

From: Joseph Failla
To: Glenn Kenny
Sept 16, 2008, 12:40 a.m.

G,
I hear the new Godfather restorations are an improvement, and look as good as they ever did, but they do not live up to the expectations set by the home theater crowd. Apparently Gordon Willis, who supervised the operation, went back and duplicated the look the films had when they originally premiered. When you think of it, what more can you ask? I mention this because I think the new discs will disappoint a lot of guys who expect each new release to surpass the last. More than likely the Godfather restorations will become the focal point in the argument of how good a film should look on home video.

I always imagined that Willis would stick as closely as possible to his original intentions. Although he did say in reference to the darkness prevailing in Godfather Part Two, that maybe he went too far in that one. So when you hear something like that, you wonder what he might do with a second pass at it. Apparently, it retains that darkness and even the grain. Possibly more grain than the first releases. I'm excited to see these regardless.

This makes an interesting comparison to Storraro's theories and reformating his own work.

Joe

From: Glenn Kenny
To: Joseph Failla
Sept. 16, 2008, 12:59 a.m.

Joe—

Not to be disrespectful or vulgar, but the "home theater crowd" can go eat a bag of dicks.

I've looked at about an hour of the Blu-ray of One, and I admit they did a very bold thing. They reproduced the film with all the grain, with all the blown-out whites of the wedding scene...all the same "imperfections" that made the studio people want to fire Willis. And help make Godfather the glorious film it is. I'll be looking at a lot more in detail soon.

There's no fucking hope for these people, I swear.

GK

To be continued.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: "Identification of A Woman"

An interesting simulacurum of a sci-fi film image from the finale of Antonioni's 1982 feature (the last he made before the debilitating stroke that curtailed his filmmaking career), which I argue is already a kind of sci-fi film to begin with. Over at The Auteur's Notebook. My editor there and I urge you to leave whatever observations you have in the comments section over there, please. Many thanks.

Dave Wallace

Those of us fortunate enough to have known David Foster Wallace personally didn't know him as David Foster Wallace. We knew him as Dave Wallace, as that is what he called himself. He is sometimes cited as "Foster Wallace," but the "Foster" wasn't part of his surname. Nor, do I think, was it his middle name, although I could be wrong about that. What I do know is that the "Foster" became part of his published name at the urging of an editor, on account of the fact that there were already dozens if not hundreds of "Dave" and "David" Wallaces in print, and it would be well for Dave to make his name more distinct.

I worked with Dave on three pieces for Premiere magazine: "David Lynch Keeps His Head," which was nominated for a National Magazine Award and subsequently anthologized in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again; a consideration of Terminator 2 and the rise of "effects porn" that Premiere declined to publish and subsequently saw print in the in-house mag of the British book chain Waterstone's; and "Big Red Son," an account of the Adult Video News award that appeared in Premiere under the title "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment" and the dual byline Willem de Groot and Matt Rundlet. (It is in the book Consider the Lobster under its original title.) And yes, therein lies a tale. A few tales, really.

Right now, I don't have the heart to tell them. I will tell you that not only was Dave a genius and great, hilarious company, he was also one of the most stand-up guys I've ever met. There was a massive amount of drama in the editing of the last-cited article, and it wound up appearing in Premiere in a version that Dave considered bowdlerized. He was pretty—no, extremely—angry about this, and said, for one thing, he was never going to write for Premiere again. I, too, was angry, as I had not agreed with how the piece had been, finally, altered, and I was preparing to resign from my position at the magazine. I mentioned this to Dave in one of our several harried exchanges about the situation. I heard from him again soon after that. He told me that, yes, he was furious with Premiere and that, no, he never intended to write for it again, but that he was not angry with me personally and I shouldn't quit on account of the situation; "I think what you do there is good, and you should keep doing it." And that, yes, he and I would continue to be friends.

And so we did. (I used to joke that had this been any other writer of stature, he would have enthusiastically approved of my quitting, and then stopped returning my calls.) I spoke to him a few months ago, after getting canned from Premiere.com, and he was typically supportive. "I always thought you were too good for them anyway," he said in his typically earnest, strangely gentle and extremely definite tone. We discussed, as usual, our mutual over-the-moonness about our mates; we had wed our respective spouses within about a year of each other, and continued to be gobsmacked by our luck in this respect. (On one of his increasingly infrequent trips to New York, in 2002, he had met my future wife Claire and pronounced her a "peach.") He sounded healthy, and happy, and...Christ. To learn tonight that he had taken his own life, it is just inconceivable to me. Inconceivable. I don't know how I can make that word register with the strength it needs to right now. Inconceivable.

Every bit of my heart goes out to his wife and family.

UPDATE: Here's something I wrote last year, on the old blog, about my adventures in the porn world with Dave, Evan Wright, and Nathaniel Welch.

Atkinson on Thomson on Ford

The new Sight and Sound rounds up a group of film critics who weigh in on the works of criticism that have had the greatest impact on them. Michael Atkinson picks David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film and gives an account of it that few would take exception to. He concludes, "Thomson leaves footprints on your critical faculties, whether you agree with him or not. All the same, I can hardly understand how any cinephile can still hold the view that John Ford is one of the greatest film-makers after reading this torching:"

And here's the Thomson passage cited:

...Ford's male chauvinism believes in uniforms, drunken candor, fresh-faced little women (though never sexuality), a gallery of supporting players bristling with tedious eccentricity and the elevation of these random prejudices into a near political attitude - thus Ford's pioneers talk of enterprise but show narrowness and reaction. Above all, his characters are accepted on their own terms - the hope of every drunk - and never viewed critically... 'The Quiet Man' is an entertainment for an IRA club night, the cavalry films as much endorsements of the military as the wartime documentaries, and 'My Darling Clementine' nostalgia for a world and code that never existed. The Ford philosophy is a rambling apologia for unthinking violence later disguised by the sham legends of old men fuddled by drink and glory.

Since you sort-of asked, Michael, here's how. It's real easy.

Without even taking into account the inverted prigishness of Thomson's faux-PC concern-trolling ("male chauvinism" is nice; "the hope of every drunk," even nicer), his reduction of Ford's world is both glib and inaccurate. Fort Apache neither endorses or condemns the cavalry. Ford's pioneers "talk of enterprise"? Where, exactly? Cite me a speech about "enterprise" in any damn Ford film. Narrowness and reaction are hallmarks of a more than a few of his characters, yes...and so what? Also note the works Thomson's writing about—or not writing about, as there are only two actually cited—could, as far as his descriptions are concerned, just as well be radio plays as films. (That invocation of the IRA is priceless, by the way. What, did Thomson let Ian Paisley make suggestions on the manuscript?)

But what's most interesting about the passage is what it omits. Put Thomson's dots together and what emerges is a cocktail party dilettante's version of Ford. The Ford described by Thomson is not the Ford who made such works as The Iron Horse, Four Sons, Pilgrimage, Young Mr. Lincoln, or, for that matter, The Fucking Grapes of Wrath. I'm not suggesting that Thomson hasn't seen those films. I am suggesting that not incorporating them into his critical, shall we say, synthesis, smacks of active malice, not to mention bad faith. So there you have it.