Some Came Running

Doubles

 The interim between Christmas and New Year's is always, at least as far as my own creative/communicative impulses are concerned, a deliberately less-than-fecund time. I'm torn between trying to relax and fully enjoy my circumstances (which are extremely cozy this year) and doing some stock-taking and trying to figure out how to be something resembling a better and more productive person over the next year. Now that the period's almost over, I'm contemplating my big-splash return to the blog (my best DVDs of 2009 feature, I think it shall be)...but not too hard. In the meantime, my friends at The Auteurs' have put up part two of its year-end survey, in which contributors concoct fantasy double features using one film screened in 2009 and another screened at any old time in the history of cinema. Check it out. It's actually a really fun exercise, and the most surreal-yet-apt pairing I could think of was Assayas' great Summer Hours with John McTiernan's latter-day version of The Thomas Crown Affair. Think about it! I have a bunch more, and so do many of the always-estimable Auteurs' contributors. Meanwhile, in a complete coincidence, and in the midst of a debate on Elia Kazan, Kent Jones, commenting at Dave Kehr's site, suggests a double feature of Zodiac and Kurosawa's High and Low, a corker of an idea, I think. 

Concocting, and then watching, such exemplary pairings seems to me an ideal way to spend the time leading up to a full-bore return to the workaday world. What 2009 films would you pair with particular pictures from the past? 

Ooops

So...I had every intention of putting up a Foreign Region DVD Report at The Auteurs' Notebook today. Brought the intended foreign-region DVD with me on my holiday trip; I'd have to rewatch it on my Mac Book, but hell, that's good enough for...never mind. But then I got to thinking, here's a picture that requires some context/textual support/something of that sort, and I'm far, far from my film library just now. So maybe the FRDR gets a break this week. But at least I could run a screen grab from the picture so you all could guess what it might be. And I went upstairs and got the DVD case and opened it and realized I'd left the actual disc in the player back home. So, so much for that idea. In the stead of anything else, I leave you with a beautiful still of one of the film's co-stars. Happy Tuesday, y'all! And by all means check out The Auteurs' unique year-end survey, in which its brilliant contributors go the year's-best thing one further and concoct fantasy double features out of 2009 films and older ones. Part One is here, I'm not in it, but I'll be in an upcoming installment. 

An SCR Christmas Miracle

Hullo dere. 

There is little of filmmaking import to report. I choose to honor a New Year's Resolution early, and not call some kind of referendum on a hiring at the L.A. Weekly. At least not here. ('Twas mentioned in my Christmas Topics, at The Auteurs'.) I haven't seen Sherlock Holmes yet. I did see Up In The Air, which I enjoyed up to a point, but not to the point where it would compel me to alter my year's best list. To tell the truth, I find the wildly divergent perspectives on the film that I've seen out there more interesting than the film itself. I am also curious as to the identity of Vera Farmiga's dorsal double. 

Truth to tell, the most interesting thing I've got is a travel tale. It begins, in O. Henry fashion, with My Lovely Wife buying a Christmas present for her dad. The present is a very nifty moustache razor from The Art of Shaving, and a box of the tiny, triangular blades said razor accepts. 

On the morning of the 23rd, Claire and I got up well before the crack of dawn, dragging down our suitcases in a slightly nervous daze, and taking the nice black corporate car to Newark Airport. Our extremely solicitous and attentive drive  —who was so solicitous and attentive that I didn't even mind the fact that he named his own tip on the payment voucher—came chasing after us as we dragged our suitcases into the Continental terminal at Newark."Excuse me, is this yours?" he asked, holding up the tiny box that held those triangular razors.

And indeed, it was ours. The question was, how did it escape from Claire's suitcase? The answer, alas, was easy enough: the zipper at the front of her formidable Samsonite case had slipped off of its track, and now its entire front panel was about to flap wide open. 

A Fritz Lang Christmas

Not something you'd really wish on anybody: the final minutes of Lang's Scarlet Street, with a desolate, derelict Edward G. Robinson walking the bustling New York streets as the sounds of Christmas carols mix with the voices in his head: the woman who made a chump out of him and the man who wrongly went to the chair for her murder, mocking him from the afterlife in between cooing at each other...and  then the crowds dissolve, the carols fade, and it's just him, and the cold, and the voices.

No; if you can do so, you should absolutely avoid having A Fritz Lang Christmas.

I'm gonna take a few days off from this enterprise to rest and enjoy the holiday. I'll be back around the 26th with, among other things, a surprising tale of airline employee helpfulness and ingenuity, but blogging will be light after it resumes at least until after the new year, because I think we've all got other stuff to do, no? In the meantime, have a joyous, peaceful time, and thanks as always for spending time here. 

Arnold

Here as Sparrow in Preminger's 1955 The Man With The Golden Arm, with Mr. Frank SInatra and Mr. Robert Strauss. What other Arnold is there, in cinema? Just that other one, the former bodybuilder and current politician, whom Mr. Stang gave an assist to in Hercules In New York circa 1970. Funny how that sort of thing works. 

Fare thee well, Top Cat, who left us at age 91. Those who hail you as having specialized in "nerdy roles" or whatnot should know better. But we here will honor you as one of the last of a breed, a stalwart character actor who blanched at nothing, not even Skidoo. God bless you and your family, and rest well, noble servant. 

Holiday classic!

In a homage to the seasonal repeats of the likes of Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer and A Charlie Brown Christmas, as well as to my own busyness/laziness, I re-present (and expand, a bit) a Foreign Region DVD Report that originally appeared at a corporate-sponsored blog. Contemplate Robert Siodmak's very unusual Christmas Holiday, at The Auteurs'.

Talk that talk

How engaging, likable, and well-informed are Jett Loe and Gareth Higgins of the online chat show (or, as they call it nowadays, podcast) The Film Talk? Engaging, likable and well-informed enough that they were able to wrangle both myself and The New York Press's Armond White onto the same episode. Separately, I have to add, although I daresay that the fellows are charming enough that they might have been able to persuade us to appear ensemble. You can listen to the episode, in which we talk bests of the year and, of course, Avatar, here. Also, the fellows are having a fundraiser, as you'll see when you visit the page, so you might wanna throw a couple of bucks their way to keep a good thing going.

Speaking of Armond White, I see that we're paired again elsewhere, sort of; he and I, for better or worse, figure prominently in my former colleague Stephen Saito's year-end roundup of, um, 2009's Most Memorable Critical Dustups. I won't say much except I think I should be flattered, and I'm fond of the picture Stephen chose to run of me, and that the larger verdict will be rendered by history, or something. Enjoy.

Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #9; "Appointment With Danger," directed by Lewis Allen; followed by a summation of What We Have Learned Here

 

The prior entry is here, and, as always, you can move backwards from there for the others. 

Three readers/friends were of great help in getting me access to this picture; I won't name them, but they know who they are, and I thank them. The above image would probably be impossible to get a "clear" version of in any manifestation, but the sight of Alan Ladd walloping Jack Webb seemed to me a no-brainer of an opener. And the background of the handball court gives the whole image the feel, for me at least, of something out of a Farber painting. In any event, here's Manny: 

"Tough, perceptive commercial job glorifying the P-men (Post-Office sleuths), set in an authentically desolate wasteland around Gary, Indiana, crawling with pessimistic mail-robbers who act as though they'd seen too many movies like Asphalt Jungle. Tight plotting, good casting, and sinuously droopy acting by Jan Sterling, as an easily had broad who only really gets excited about—and understands—waxed bop. Interesting for Morgan-Webb bit playing, such sidelights as the semi-demi-hemiquaver of romantic attachment between the head P-man and a beautiful nun."

Favorite Thing

My buddy Andrew O'Hehir, the intrepid "Beyond the Multiplex" explorer at Salon, is now also heading up that site's Film Salon, which kicked off just a week or so back. He's gathered an impressive and eclectic group of contributors to answer the question "What was your favorite film of the decade?" Not the greatest, or best, or whatnot, but favorite. It's an interesting approach to a potentially hackneyed theme, and the responses thus far have been interesting, memorable. My answer, about a film my regular readers know I've been raving about and maintaining as a touchstone for years, is here. Andrew's waggish sense of humor is reflected by the piece that he placed directly below my own, which, I must say, contains the most hilarious lede I've read in perhaps a decade. 

Declaration of principles

Just so we're all on the same page here, people.

The ever-entertaining Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere spent a large part of last summer and autumn sneering about how bad Avatar was going to be; the actual experience of the film turned him around, and he now regards it with the same sort of soulful eyes that Charlie Dog puts on when he wants to impress a potential master. So these days he feels compelled to call out the infidels, as it were, and today he issued a "take that" to AICN's Mr. Beaks and CHUD's Devin Faraci (or, as I like to call them, "the guys with the beards") and "all the rest of the anti-Avatar fanboys" who compound their error by liking the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Said "take that" was in the form of a previously posted comment from someone with the handle "Plastique Elephant" who begins thusly: "Like people who can't dig Arcade Fire's Funeral, I'd find it hard to respect anybody who can't enjoy this bloody masterpiece." Reading that, I spit out my coffee. I thought about making the thing a "comment we never finished reading" item, but I read the rest in any case, and I left a comment on Jeff's thread. I said it there, and I'm gonna say it here. Just so everyone knows where I'm coming from, man:

"That Arcade Fire album is a lotta overwrought, off-key, charmless, arty Canadian crap. Seriously: rock and roll is dead, alternative rock is dead, all forms of rock are dead. Free jazz lives. Peter Brotzmann rules. Get with the motherfucking program, people."

You dig?