Some Came Running

Blu movies

Believe it or not—and I know you want to believe it, really I do—I'm not too often prone to professional jealousy. My dislikes and resentments, and I admit, they are many, generally stem from who people are and what they do, what they stand for and what they don't, rather than any position they hold relative to my own. On the occasions when I do feel a pang of "I can't believe they gave him/her that job"-ness, I try to keep it to myself. But I have to admit I felt a bit of a twinge when I read earlier in the week that Michael Atkinson was taking the position of DVD reviewer at Movieline. 

Now Michael's been reviewing DVDs for the IFC Independent Eye website for a while, I know. Hell, I even made fun of one of his DVD reviews there a couple of weeks ago. And while he and I have had our tussles on the internet (Jesus God almighty, is there anyone I haven't had a tussle with on the internet?), when all is said and done I consider Michael a fine fellow and a distinctive writer. A little blustery at times, for sure, but you know, he owns his bluster, much as I own my...raging dickheadedness? No, it shouldn't be that. It's something. But I'm not sure. But anyway. The point is that it really caused me no pain to learn that Movieline now wants to pay the guy to compose prose poems on Marlon Brando's jawline as said jawline is rendered in a leading home theater format. No, this was the sentence in the announcement that irritated me: "Michael will provide excellent reconnaissance from the DVD/Blu-ray front several times per week." 

Blu-ray? Really? Goddamnit, I didn't write the book on Blu-ray (now that I think of it, that might not be such a bad idea), but I did write the Popular Mechanics article on it (the entirety of which appears to no longer be online, but here's the first page), and I made only one mistake in it, mixing up Super Technirama with VistaVision, which given the technical similarities of the format, could have happened to anybody!!!! Also: I started my career at a magazine named Video Review. Editing the Test Reports. You know, the ones with the luminance numbers and the signal-to-noise ratios and the goddamn footcandles/footlamberts. I've forgotten more about this technology than most of these schmucks who yammer on about this and that but probably couldn't set a goddamn clock on a  VCR back in the day to save their life ever even learned. I was IN JAPAN to see the very first demonstrations of the MPEG video compression format that wound up MAKING DVD AND BLU-RAY EVEN POSSIBLE! ("This will never work," I said at the time, so crappy did the results look back then.)

Back when I was running the Home Guide at Premiere, I rather developed a horror of DVD reviews that functioned as de facto late critiques of contemporary pictures. My perspective was, well, the film critics have had their say, and if you're reviewing the disc version of the movie, then review that. (Although I recall that when Christopher Kelly was writing most of the reviews for the section, his perspectives could yield some interestingly counterintuitive results; a positive notice for The Other Sister, for instance.) Now obviously it's a whole other kettle of fish when you're dealing with classic or repertory fare on disc. Dave Kehr, who's completely The Man in this department, is invariably brilliant when discussing both the films in question themselves, and also how they've fared in the transit from celluloid to the digital domain. This issue is, I think, particularly crucial when you're discussing Blu-ray. I don't mean to sound rude or anything (well, maybe I do), but with rare exceptions I've got to say that unless you are Dave Kehr, I really don't give a shit what you think of any given movie on Blu-ray. I just want to know how it looks and why it looks the way it does. (See DVD Beaver...and even they can get it wrong, as they did here, a review that needs updating since the recent correctly remastered version.) The rest I can figure out myself. Whether Michael Atkinson's gonna talk about that in his Blu-ray writeups remains to be seen—I haven't seen him tackle a title in that format yet from his Movieline perch. But I wish him all good fortune in the gig in any event. 

All this is also by way of guiding you to this week's topics, questions, and exercises at The Auteurs' Notebook, which contains a chat with Warner Home Video's Vice President of mastering Ned Price, about the gorgeous new Blu-ray of Doctor Zhivago (not depicted above, in case you were wondering) and the upcoming digital rethink of Citizen Kane, and a bit more. All very wonky and technical...just the way I like it when we're talking film preservation and Blu-ray and stuff.

Image of the day, 4/29/10

If you have to ask what film, you may be at the wrong blog. This screen cap is ripped directly from the standard-def disc of the new Criterion transfer; both this and the Blu-ray came under my very blessed transom today. I've got too much work at the immediate moment to sit down and study/enjoy the new versions... but there's little else I'd rather be doing at this moment! I'll get to it ASAP, and give you a lengthy report soon thereafter.

"The Killer Inside Me" at the Tribeca Film Fesitval

With a lot of pictures that have storied and complicated production backstories, you can see it on the screen (and that's the only time it ought to matter, I suppose). From what I've read, I understand that this project—an adaptation of hard-boiled writer Jim Thompson's most famous novel, which was filmed before by Burt Kennedy with Stacy Keach in the lead role in 1976—pretty much fell into director Michael Winterbottom's lap after bouncing from filmmaker to filmmaker, practically around the globe. (WInterbottom is British and the screenwriter, John Curran, also a director of note, is Australian.) Whatever you make of this as both a movie and a Thompson adaptation, it's in no way an equivocal or equivocated piece of filmmaking.

The picture played at New York's Tribeca Film Festival last night, relatively hot on the heels of a contentious showing at Sundance in January, wherein many audience members—and supposedly one member of the film's stellar cast—were repulsed by the violence overall, and particularly in one scene, in which the sociopathic West Texas deputy sheriff Lou Ford methodically beats a woman, seemingly to death, all the while apologizing to and professing love for his victim. Those who know the novel and Thompson's work overall understand that this sort of thing is, well, what it is. (Here's a sample of the scene as it appears in the novel: "I backed her against the wall, slugging, and it was like pounding a pumpkin. Hard, then everything giving way at once.") But Thompson's work isn't as much in vogue today as it was 15 or twenty years ago. There's also what one might call a heightened sensitivity at work in the zeitgeist, if you will, which results in depictions of ostensibly or possibly misogynist acts and attitudes as misogynist in themselves. Musician David Thomas got into a bit of a pickle when he titled a recent Pere Ubu album Why I Hate Women. It didn't cut much ice with some objectors when Thomas explained the title was supposed to be that of the Jim Thompson novel that Thompson never wrote. (The fact that Ubu's longtime bassist is herself a woman was also not considered a mitigating factor.) It is interesting to note that in a world where postmodernism supposedly holds a significant number of the cards, there are some things that some folks still insist on taking at face value. 

In any event, last night the crowd didn't balk, not at the violence at least. It was somewhat perturbed by the lateness of the screening start, which forced a truncating of the Q&A session afterwards. I had the honor or moderating that session, which featured Winterbottom, Lou Ford portrayer Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson, who play the women in Ford's life, and Liam Aiken and Matthew Maher, both very striking in small but key supporting roles. While Killer is often characterized as a classic of that most elusive-to-pin-down of genres, noir, Winterbottom's visual approach here relies less on dark and shadow than on the merciless glare of the American Southwest's sun; but when I asked about this, the director insisted he wasn't taking a schematic or counterintuitive approach but just working with what was there—naturalistic, if you will. Winterbottom's quite canny here about making things pay off well after some viewers might have forgotten that a question was ever posed in the first place. There's a shot in an early scene in the film featuring Ford having a tense conversation with a union chief (Elias Koteas, swell as ever) that seems out of place, completely from an unknown point of view; it isn't for another forty-five minutes or so that we learn what that shot was doing there. 

The specific atmosphere of Thompson's work—which is that of perdition, to adapt Robert Benayoun's seminal phrase—is pretty difficult to get onto film. One sometimes believes that grainy, scratched-up, overbright 8mm is really the way to go—what you want is a sense that you're watching something you're not supposed to be watching. For all the other virtues of films such as The Grifters, Peckinpah's The Getaway, and Coup de Torchon (adapted from Pop. 1280), they only have fleeting moments in which the seediness and multi-leveled rot of which Thompson writes becomes palpable. (And even the crime thriller Thompson wrote directly for the screen—Kubrick's The Killing, adapted from Lionel White's Clean Break—winds up sentimentalizing its bad men somewhat.) The closest any film has come to having that atmosphere permeate the proceedings is Alain Corneau's thoroughly staggering 1979 Serie Noire, adapted (with dialogue courtesy of Georges Perec!) from Thompson's A Hell of a Woman, in which dissolute travelling salesman Patrick Dewaere falls hard for a teen prostitute played by Marie Trintignant, who was herself only about 16 at the time. Man, that's a film that makes you want to take multiple showers after watching it.

This Killer isn't that strong, but it's still pretty potent, worth the time of the old-school crime-thriller aficionado for sure. The performances in particular bring it a notable life, and Affleck now has another very memorable portrait of a very troubled soul under his belt. Conventional wisdom has it that Lou Ford ought to have been played by a Robert Mitchum type, and some silly people have complained that Affleck's too slight, too weedy, to embody the kind of brutal twisted self-regarding fuckup Ford is. I think he's perfect; when all is said and done, Lou's a weakling, and whether smirking or gritting his teeth, Affleck makes the character's lack of fiber, let's call it, pulsate from under his skin. Very nice work.

Make honey

Good news...not that it's what you'd call unexpected: the new Second Run DVD of Frantisek Vlacil's magnificent The Valley of the Bees is as spiffy and beautifully produced as pretty much everything else that the great U.K.-based label puts out. It walks all over the domestic Facets disc, for sure. I get into it more in today's Foreign Region DVD Report, at The Auteurs' Notebook. But you probably knew that.

Killer personal appearance alert

Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, which apparently proved the consensus-building screwball comedy hit of the last Sundance Film Festival, screens as part of the Tribeca Film Festival tomorrow evening at 7 p.m. at the SVA Theater. The film will be followed by a Q&A session featuring Winterbottom and several members of the film's cast. Your humble servant shall be moderating said Q&A session, and depending on which cast members show, he will fully divulge the details of whatever personal relations he has had with them, in the interests of integrity and journalistic ethics and all. Those who can show up, and are inclined to, are hereby encouraged to concoct some good questions.

Hitchcock's scenes from a marriage: "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956)

I had the privilege and pleasure over the weekend of revisiting this, a Hitchcock film to which one can justifiably apply the three "U"s of cinephilia: underseen, underrated, underappreciated. This is not a picture that begins with a bang (more on that later), and that its conclusion is a punchline (albeit a very good, funny punchline) rather than a conventionally satisfying tying-up of emotional loose ends is a little disappointing, but for all that, this Man (remade by Hitchcock from his considerably sparser 1934 version; as Hitchcock said to François Truffaut, "the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional") is a remarkably rich and engaging film containing some of the most bravura filmmaking of the maestro's career.

I have to say, though, what really struck me throughout the first half was the nuanced but unsparing depiction of a marriage that could, frankly, go either way given a change of circumstance or two. The film's first scene, with Dr. Ben McKenna (James Stewart), wife Jo (Doris Day), and lively, precocious son Hank (Christopher Olsen), being all normal on the bus to Marakech and having the local ways explained to them by seemingly helpful Frenchman Louis Bernard (Daniel Gelin, Maria Schneider's dad, whose character here notes "The Muslim religion allows for very few accidents") establishes a veneer that starts to crack pretty much as soon as the family disembarks at their station. Jo—later established as "the famous Jo Conway," a stage star who gave up her career for family life—aggressively has at Ben apropos the Frenchman's seemingly intrusive inquisitiveness. She's got a point, as it turns out, but her approach to the issue verges on the paranoid. Subsequently, each little encounter with people or customs that irk the McKennas immediately leads to them lashing out at each other, or acting out in a way designed to embarrass the partner. "Is this going to be our monthly fight?" asks Jo pointedly at one juncture. Ben's worries about Bernard—planted their by Jo—prompt him to pick on Jo in the middle of a restaurant meal, and then tear into his chicken dish in a way that's expressly...well, frowned upon by the locals. And so on. When real trouble happens, the good doctor actually sedates his wife before telling her. On giving her a few pills, Jo looks at them in her hand and says, "Six months ago you said I took too many of these." Whoa. 

The marital discord was to continue throughout, but its depiction was trumped by Hitchcock's formal concerns. The picture's huge set piece is, of course, the prevention of an assassination attempt during the middle of a musical performance in London's Albert Hall. The script (an excellent one, by John Michael Hayes and Angus MacPhail, from Charles Bennett and D.B. Wyndham Lewis' story) had Ben and Jo meeting up at the Hall and exchanging any number of cross words before the climactic action occurs. But Hitchcock balked at the dialogue. "I'm not hearing the London Symphony," he apparently groused to Stewart. So, continues Jack Sullivan in his superb book Hitchcock's Music, "[w]hen Ben and Jo find each other, they talk excitedly—but we hear nothing; all speech is obliterated by music, which refuses to recede to the background. Hitchcock's sound notes for the reel are emphatic: 'The main sound will remain exactly as the existing music track from beginning to end.' [...][T]he audience was to hear Ben and Jo's abrasive exchange, as well as other dialogue in the lobby. But during shooting, Hitchcock asked everyone to stop talking: 'Why don't you cut the dialogue and let us hear the music?' Everyone on the set thought he had lost his judgment, if not his marbles, but once the talk was eliminated the sequence became strangely compelling."

Indeed. But it is also here that the film loses that particular thematic thread, Ben and Jo's troubled marriage, and brings definitively to the fore the finding-the-kidnapped-child theme, executed to such wrenching effect in what is, after all, the film's final movement. It is, as Robin Wood notes (in Hitchcock's Films Revisited), the "real climax" of this version, and Wood goes on: "Middle-aged academics are not supposed to admit that they burst into tears every time Doris Day begins 'Che sera, sera,' but in my case it is a fact." Same here, although for me it's actually when Hank returns the singing with a whistle that this middle-aged non-academic chokes up. It's a supremely upsetting moment, and this moment, as well as her entire performance here, represents a career high for Day, who is herself a supremely undervalued performer whose versatility and wit underlies everything she does.

I saw the film at Suffern, N.Y.'s fabulous Lafayette Theater, as part of its Big Screen Classics series. The print was a gorgeous vault print from Universal, featuring the original Paramount logo. While the current DVD begins with a hard cut after the opening credits to the bus ride, this correct version has a nice fade-in from that. It's also more detailed and less loud, color-wise, than the current disc; I would hope that someday a new version might be made (in Blu-ray, even) from the materials that generated this superb print. My next trip to the theater, which I most recently wrote about here, will be on May 8 for the newly-restored version of The Red Shoes. You should totally check it out if you're in the tri-state area.

Big in Paris

...and absolutely 100% rightfully so, sez I. Le roi is but one component in a verbal collage concerning the reputations of certain American filmmakers here and abroad, said collage comprising this weeks Topics, etc. at The Auteurs', as always. Enjoy.

This sign

Five Easy Pieces, a still-pertinent saga Life In These United States, and stuff, turns 40 this year, and a newly restored version of the film plays at L.A.'s great NuArt theater this weekend to celebrate. I spoke to Karen Black and director Bob Rafelson about the picture and wrote about it for the Los Angeles Times, here. Enjoy.

Winks like Sarah Palin. Does production numbers like Lady Gaga.

Who am I talking about? Who but Robot Maria, the evil cyber-alchemical doppelganger of sweet organic Maria in Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis. No joke. 

 

In the above shot Robot Maria's letting Joh Fredersen, the "brain" or "head" of the futuristic titular megacity, that she totally "gets" what he's on about and is ready to get the job done.

 

And here, she's fascinating the super-rich patrons of the Yoshiwara nightclub, and pretty much literally embodying the you-know-what of Babylon. Rockin' the headgear, natch. To think that actress Brigitte Helm was a mere teen when she acted in this. Kick ass!

Who knew that these would be the most actually prescient aspects of this delirious epic, which will be screening in a newly restored version presented by Kino International at Manhattan's Film Forum beginning May 6 7? The new restoration, which adds almost thirty minutes of newly-found (and frequently rather rough-looking) footage to Lang's epic, fleshes out certain plot threads—the "Thin Man"'s pursuit of Freder Frederson, for instance, which has some great cat-and-mouse action—and expands on certain crucial action scenes, such as the attack on the city's "Heart Machine." The reason the restored footage looks so rough is because its source is a very old 16mm print found in Argentina a couple of years back. In the new restoration, this footage is presented in a different scale from the previously restored stuff; there's a black border on the top and left sides of the frame. The effect is slightly...scholarly. But it doesn't at all detract from the film's exhilaration. And the new material of course also adds mightily to the film's, well, ridiculousness.

While Lang and producer Erich Pommer were inspired by their first glimpse of the New York City skyline when they shared an ocean voyage to the States in 1924, who the hell knows what was inspiring scenarists Lang and Thea von Harbou when they cooked up Metropolis' stew of religious allegory and goofy labor-relations parable. The film's epigram about how the "mediator" between "brain and hands must be the heart" is one of the most empty-headed bromides ever to not grace a Hallmark card. (And it says quite a bit about Madonna Ciccone's intellectual attainment, such as it is, that she adopted it whole-heartedly for that dopey Metropolis-homage video for "Express Yourself.") H.G. Wells was in fact one-hundred percent correct when he deemed this "the silliest film." It's not just the nonexistent-to-incoherent philosophy it trucks in. I mean, think about it: Joh Frederson (the great Alfred Abel), decides he's going to use Rotwang's Robot Maria to drive the workers to violent unrest, after which he will have a perfect excuse to oppress them further, and violently. But apparently it doesn't occur to him that as said workers go about their violent unrest, they're likely to do such damage as to pretty much shut the city down. Which they do. After which Fredersen...calls in the army or national guard he's had on alert since hatching his scheme, instructing them to impose martial law? Why no, he does no such thing. Such a strategy isn't even mentioned. No, instead Fredersen staggers to Metropolis' cathedral, to witness the climactic rooftop battle between his dippy son Freder and the magnificently evil Rotwang (the even-greater-than-Abel Rudolf Klein-Rogge).

 

That's right, Joh; don't just do something, kneel there! 

Metropolis is also one of the earliest and most significant proponents of the "who cares if it makes sense, as long as it looks cool?" school of filmmaking. (A friend reminded me of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari when I brought up this notion, and he has a small point; only Caligari's overt subject happens to be the derangment of the senses, which gives its visuals a wholly apropos rationale throughout.) What the hell does the clock-looking gizmo that worker Georgi (aka "11811") has to tend to actually do, anyway? Why does Good Maria keep dicking around with those heavy levers even after she's got the gong alarm sounding but good? Etc. We all know the answer to these questions, finally, which is "Who cares?"

Which brings me to a final question: Would Metropolis be as much of a blast if it were, in fact, smarter and/or made more sense? Lang's prior Dr. Mabuse Der Spieler (which, we should recall, was adapted from an outside source) is equally thrilling but not nearly as risible. And for that, I still think this picture's unself-conscious pulp idiocy is somehow part of its greatness. And if someone would like to argue that it's not idiocy, I'm willing to entertain that, too. In any event, this new Metropolis is essential viewing. Of course.

Congratulations to Aronofsky and Fincher

It pleases us to report that in the first annual "Glenn Kenny Sublimates His Raging Dickheadedness By Reorganizing His DVD Shelves" spring cleaning extravaganza both Darren Aronofsky and David Fincher have successfully made the transition from the general/alphabetical-by-title shelf to the much-coveted...Auteurs' shelves. Aronofsky  fits in snugly between Argento and Ashby, while Fincher comes in between Jacques Feyder and Richard Fleischer, with heavyweights Louis Feiullade and John Ford closely flanking those luminaries. Good company.Once again, congrats, fellows, and do keep up the fine work!