Some Came Running

Argument clinic

Last night my buddy Aaron Aradillas convened a little group to debate the merits of Synecdoche New York, a film that apparently you just can't run out of arguments about. On the pro side: Myself and FIlmbrain Andrew Grant. On the anti, Mr. Aradillas and the estimable Keith Uhlich, of The House Next Door and now, as you'll see, Time Out New York. I am proud to say that as far as I can recollect, nobody stoops to using the word "pretentious" during the entire hour-plus conversation. You can confirm that here if you're so inclined. 

Natasha (updated from 3/17)

From The Comfort Of Strangers, Paul Schrader, 1990

Natasha Richardson is, and always has been, an actress of uncommon beauty, intelligence and grace. I have ever loved her work, and I must admit that, ever since seeing her once in person, lunching at the late, great Lola sometime in the latter part of the 1980s—where she looked several times more gorgeous and luminous than she does in even her most glamourous screen roles, and impressed this six-foot-plus lad with her height as well—I've nurtured a starstruck crush on her of the sort that I'm loath to admit, not being much of a starstruck sort in general. All of which is my roundabout and awkward way of saying I'm genuinely, and possibly inappropriately, torn up by her current plight, and that I'm praying for her, and for all of her family, very ardently indeed. 

UPDATE: I just (late Wednesday) learned the awful news of her death. One may connect what dots one may—I think of Natasha's mother, Vanessa Redgrave, bringing to life Joan DIdion's grief so very recently—but the bottom line is there is no greater tragedy than a parent having to put to rest a child. For whatever it's worth, I would like to convey my most sincere condolences to all of Natasha Richardson's family. 

Herr Klaus Kinski respectfully but firmly requests...

...your presence at The Auteurs' Notebook, where Herr Kenny considers a very great Douglas Sirk film, A Time To Love And A Time To Die, and its utterly indispensable DVD release via Eureka!/Masters of Cinema, for this week's Foreign Region DVD Report. We'll look for you there. 

Wellman's women

I'm a little under half of the way through Warner's wonderful Forbidden Hollywood Collection: Volume Three, which assembles six films by the great, but underrated-by-Andrew-Sarris-in-The American Cinema director William "Wild Bill" Wellman. Of the first four of the six films—I haven't listened to any of the commentaries yet, and have yet to check out the two films on the third disc, or the documentaries on Wellman on the fourth disc—the only one I'd call a stone masterpiece is 1931's Other Men's Women, a jarring study of what one might call entirely innocent infidelity, made with a sensitivity to space, and place, and movement that is still staggering to witness today. It was released the same year as Wellman's The Public Enemy, and is in several respects (James Cagney's performance and Enemy's shattering finale notwithstanding) the better film. 1932's The Purchase Price is not so good as Other Men's Women, its set-up being a rather uneasy cross between Murnau's City Girl and any generic pic of the day featuring a gangster's discontented moll; and Midnight Mary and Frisco Jenny, both from 1933, are crackling, juicy, a bit overly-serious melodramas that might have disappeared had they not benefitted from the particularities of Wellman's touch. Which, in each of the films, goes beyond his snap-crackle-pop narrative sense. What's more striking than that is how he gives the female leads in each film their own heads. He doesn't judge, never lords it over them. Even the most morally breezy of pre-Code pictures had a hard time resisting the misogyny that was part and parcel of the culture back in the day. Wellman didn't just like women, he respected them. Mary Astor's torn wife in Other Men's Women would have been condemned by almost any other director of the time. Barbara Stanwyck's scheming chantoozie, on the run from her gangster boyfriend in The Purchase Price, is allowed her reasons. Wellman makes Ruth Chatterton's Frisco Jenny, a brothel manager who gives up the son who will grow up to become a D.A. and send her up the river, a less treacly, but still heartbreaking, ur-Stella Dallas. 

It's his portrayal of putative bad girl and murderess Mary Miller in Midnight Mary that raises the most eyebrows. Partially because it's Loretta Young, who not only had mostly played exploited virgins, but in real life kept a "swear" penaltyjar on her movie sets, who is here portraying, well, a full-blooded expert in the erotic arts.

Well, maybe. The most jaw-dropping scene is late in the picture, wherein she's attempting to distract her no-goodnik gangster boyfriend Leo Darcy (Ricardo Cortez). First, she strikes a pose potent enough to make him grip the outer edge of his dresser drawer, as seen above. Next, she falls into his arms, and starts whispering sweet nothings in his ear, the better to make him impersonate Gaston Modot in Bunuel's L'Age d'Or. 

Hokely mokely. With this shot, and the next...

...during which we hear no dialogue, we, or, perhaps I should say, the more dirty-minded in the audience (which, let's face it, Wellman is trying to get us all to be), can only infer the absolutely filthy things she's telling him she's gonna do for/to him if only he doesn't rush out of there...

...and she tries to seal the deal with a kiss.

It doesn't quite work the way she planned, which leaves the more dirty-minded among us to contemplate just what a sap Cortez's character was for not staying put. Ah, well. Still—the portrait here goes beyond its substantial sexual heat, and even beyond a study of a woman's wiles. It's complex, non-moralistic, and fully cognizant of its erotics, as it were. Tough-minded, unsentimental...appreciative. 

HAT TIP: The great Doug Pratt, who suggested the ear-nibbling shot as an Image For The Day.

"Alexander the Last"

Amy Seimetz and Jess Weixler in Alexander the Last

This picture represents a huge leap forward for its director, Joe Swanberg. I've complained in the past that the "reality" of Swanberg's features doesn't resemble the reality of the world we all share so much as it does the reality of a half-assed improv acting workshop. With Alexander the Last, which Swanberg, as per usual, also co-wrote, shot and edited, the invented reality is artful enough to finally convince. Shots and actors' movements are blocked competently. Furniture is where it should be. Compare the beach scene in Swanberg's 2006 LOL with a similarly-set scene here and you get the picture immediately. 

Other aspects of the film are similarly more honed than in any prior Swanberg picture. The dialogue, while hardly ever pithy or witty, is more pointed, rambles less. There even are a couple of moments that are as funny and charming as they want to be, say, when Hellen (Amy Seimetz), sister of title character Alexander (Jess Weixler), applies some wet flour to Alexander's face in the middle of a dough-making session and dubs her "a Knight of the Order of the Baked Goods." The acting, overall, is more even; you don't have the feeling, as in Hannah Takes The Stairs, of one potentially engaging performer (in that film, Greta Gerwig), futilely rubbing up against a couple of hapless flounderers. Indeed, lead actresses Weixler and Seimetz interact, and eventually confront each other, so convincingly that the film almost achieves a near-combustive emotional temperature heretofore unknown in Swanberg's works. And while it's true that Justin Rice (of that fucking wuss-ass band Flogging the Bishop*, and Andrew Bujalski's Mutual Appreciation), playing Alexander's musician husband Eliott, is a somewhat problematic male screen presence in that he appears to possess no testosterone whatsoever (seriously, he makes the  "before" character in those old comic book body-building ads looks like Burt Lancaster), and that Barlow Jacobs, as the acting colleague for whom Alexander develops a vexing affection, does indeed, as Jeffrey Wells notes, have a very bad haircut, your correspondent was grateful enough for the on-screen absence of the auteur himself that these guys didn't bug him all that much.

In other developments, it seems as if Swanberg's been watching some Godard. To wit, near the end of the film Rice recites Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Bells" as Weixler attempts to—what's the word?—canoodle him. Kind of brings to mind the reading of Poe's "The Oval Portrait" in Vivre sa Vie. Only, you know, less purposeful. Earlier in the film there's a lengthy shot of Weixler and Seimetz facing each other in profile, with Jacobs in between the two, facing the camera in dark sunglasses and maintaining a deadpan expression as the actresses simultaneously recite some doggerel about their very-close sisterly relationship. The net effect is kind of Mystic Pizza by way of Made in USA, but you gotta give Swanberg points for trying. Maybe producer Noah Baumbach's signal contribution to the piece was lending Swanberg some DVDs. 

Does this polishing, and the concurrent stabs at contriving direct effects (including, I have to admit, a final shot that is every bit as ominous and resonant as it wants to be), mean that Swanberg, as David Denby speculates in his New Yorker review of Alexander, is "giving up some of the methods of mumblecore?" "I think not, baby puppy," Denby's colleague Richard Brody responds at his excellent new blog The Front Row. Okay, no, he doesn't actually say "I think not, baby puppy." He instead says that Swanberg is "deepening" mumblecore, citing the scenes in which Jane Adams' unnamed character directs Alexander and Jacobs' character Jamie in a sex scene for the play they're rehearsing. Per Brody,the questions explored in these sequences, among them "how do you fake sex?" mean that Swanberg's "digging deeper into the twin essence of mumblecore: the relation of filmmaker to performer, and the relation of documentary to fiction." Perhaps. But by keeping himself out of the film—for which, I once again say, I am in most respects very grateful—Swanberg rather lets himself off a particular hook. At the film's website, the scenario page reads, "Focusing on an artistic young couple, Alexander the Last illuminates the challenges of monogamy amidst myriad sexual and creative temptations." That, along with the potentially allusive title (to Mazursky's Alex in Wonderland, an 8 1/2 homage about a would-be auteur's crisis), led me to extrapolate, at the time the site went up, that this movie could be about, say, a director who casts both himself and his wife in his films, in various explicit sex scenes, and who could be suspected of using other sex scenes in his films as pretexts by which to put himself into sexual situations with attractive female performers who aren't his wife. Now that would've been a ballsy flick. Kind of creepy in a Schraderesque way, or maybe more like that dude who made Secret Things and then got arrested, and then made a movie in response to getting arrested...

But, you've got to take the film you've got, and admittedly, the film we've got here is quite a bit more, let's say, pleasant than what I might have anticipated. (Turns out the title isn't particularly allusive to anything, either.) And still, like Manohla Dargis, I'm not entirely impressed or convinced. For every flash of insight or emotional truth offered up by Alexander the Last, there are at least two more moments of dull diffusion, passages in which the film only circles around in its self-created cul-de-sac...and for all that Swanberg has to stretch out his end-credit sequence for a near-eternity in order to get Alexander up to the 72-minute mark. Alexander the Last is, I have to admit, not entirely gruel. But it's still pretty damn thin. 

*Yes, I know that Rice's band is actually called Bishop Allen. I like my name better.

Prostitutes who know how to sail

I think this post should earn Jeff Wells the Nobel Prize for Literature. Seriously. 

The sublime Sirk

Who was it that said Cinemascope was only good for shooting snakes and funerals?

The above funeral takes place in Douglas Sirk's sublime 'scope achievement A Time To Love And Time To Die, which is being released by Eureka!/Masters of Cinema in a two-disc Region 2 DVD edition in Britain at the end of March; I'll be previewing it next week for The Auteurs'. And then there's that Blu-ray of The Robe that I hope to get through today. It's nice to "go wide" on a Friday afternoon when there's little news to post. See you Monday!

More real movie reviews!...

...are over at IFC.com. This week it's one for three. That is, one masterpiece, Kiroshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata, and two servings of tripe, John Maybury's The Edge of Love and Some Dude's remake of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left. Man, Garret Dillahunt is a tool. He's second from left, above, in the role of Mean Johnny Knoxville; joining him are Aaron Paul as Fake Ben Foster, Spencer Treat Clark as Badly Drawn Boy, and Riki Lindhome as Big-Eyed Frequently Topless Spooky Chick.

The parents of one of the victims in this version are played by Tony Goldwyn and Monica Potter, and as I note in my IFC writeup, for some of the New York moviegoing intelligentsia it seems like only yesterday that Ms. Potter appeared in Con Air.

"Monica Potter deserves better," one alter cocker complained on the way out. 

"Which one was she?" a similarly inclined friend asked. 

"The daughter."

Your humble correspondent's eyes widened. Ever eager to be helpful, he chimed in. "Hold it there, fellas. It's been quite a while since the Spider movie. Potter is the mom in this."

A female member of the contingent piped up. "That's right. She played the daughter in the original."

(n.b., the release date of the original Last House on the Left: August 30, 1972. Date of Monica Potter's birth: June 30, 1971.)

"That's a nice homage," the alter cocker said. 

I gave up. 

Before he was "Sir Dickie"...

...Richard Attenborough was a pretty compelling screen performer, and his 1947 turn as a religious (sort of) gangster in a picture that ran in the U.S. as Young Scarface (for reasons made obvious above) is credited with, among other interesting things, predicting punk rock. But then, what didn't predict punk rock? My musings on the film in question comprise this week's Foreign Region DVD Report, over at The Auteurs'.

Think less "avant garde" and more "treasures"...

Above, a typically arresting image from George Kuchar's hilarious and strangely humane 1977 I, An Actress, starring Kuchar and Barbara Lapsley, one of the 26 films collected on Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, the latest offering from the American Film Preservation Foundation and Image. I write about thebeautifully put-together box over at The Auteurs', concentrating largely on the variety of the pieces contained therein and how they contribute to an ever-malleable definition of the term "avant garde." What I don't think I convey sufficiently is how fabulous a lot of these pictures are, and how some of them are still working on me. I need to look at, for instance Christopher Maclaine's The End, Hollis Frampton's (nostalgia), and Wallace Berman's Aleph some more, and soon. The Treasures project is something that deserves every cinephile's support, I think, so even of you believe you're sort of "meh" as far as this sort of thing goes, you still might wanna consider getting this—it'll stretch you some, and in some hopefully enjoyable ways.