Some Came Running

You're like me

[Bumped and updated.]

It was pretty widely known that Dennis Hopper had been terminally ill for some time; and for all that, I don't doubt there are those who are prone to speculate that his passing over this particular weekend was a final manifestation of his imp of the perverse, forcing bloggers and journalists and other media sorts who no doubt had other plans for their time out of their leisure and back to their work stations for at least a little while. I don't truck in that sort of thing, so you won't find me making any speculations of the sort. 

I wrote an official Hopper-type obit for MSN Movies some months ago, and I imagine the actor's death has taken the folks over there somewhat unawares, or maybe they just felt my piece wasn't up to snuff; the Associated Press obit is all that's up there at the moment. I'll update with a link to the piece when it goes up. (Update, 6/1/10: And here it is.) In the meantime; well, of course everybody's going to talk about Blue Velvet, but boy, there are so many others, and the Hopper performance I find more resonant every years—"A little older, a little more confused," man, ain't that the truth!—is his Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders' The American Friend. What a stroke of genius, to play Highsmith's master sociopath as genuinely, thoroughly, poignantly, sad...to his very bone. But not pathetic or pathetique; still utterly lethal. The look in his eye after Bruno Ganz's Jonathan Zimmermann brushes him off with an "I've heard of you," and how that offhand remark seals poor Zimmermann's fate...that's both film acting at its best,  and most nuanced, and directorial sensibility/sensitivity that knows just how to use such performing genius.

The one problem with his being so fully identified with the Velvet madman Frank Booth is that the notoriety of the association didn't yield Hopper many subsequent roles in which he could be terribly subtle. Say what you will about Isabel Coixet's Elegy, but it was certainly one of the latter-day films in which Hopper wasn't being asked to play a cartoon, and he was clearly happy for the opportunity to stretch a bit. Other such opportunities came with films such as Alison McLean's 1999 Jesus' Son and my friends Brian Koppelman and David Levien's 2001 Knockaround Guys. And let's face it, some of the cartoons were a hell of a lot of fun; see Romero's 2005 Land of the Dead. That aged baby boomer he played in those financial planning commercials, though; that dude I wasn't too nuts about. 

He lived a Hollywood career that really does earn the designation "legendary:" from old school to new school to what-the-fuck-school and back again. The crazy so-and-so went through a bazillion permutations of not compromising; if anyone ever earned a "Rest in Peace," he has.

UPDATE: My friend Joseph Failla recalls the early days of the revival of Hopper consciousness among metropolitan cinephiles:

I happened to find the actual Film Forum schedule from Dec '87 to Mar '88 which included their tribute to Dennis Hopper titled, OUT OF THE SIXTIES, which ran for three weeks in March (4-24) and that we attended. It included the New York premiere of DENNIS HOPPER: SOME KIND OF GENIUS, a 1987 documentary by Paul Joyce, basically a candid conversation with Hopper about "his Shakespearean training, his early idols, the acting technique he learned from James Dean and his history of conflict with the Hollywood establishment". This is where we heard about Hopper's confrontation with Henry Hathaway during the making of KATIE ELDER in which he suffered a breakdown. GENIUS was shown at least once a day throughout the series.

The line up was as follows...

March 4-5 Fri/Sat

EASY RIDER and a new 35 mm print of THE TRIP

March 6-7 Sun/Mon

THE LAST MOVIE (print courtesy Dennis Hopper) and THE AMERICAN DREAMER

March 8-9 Tues/Weds

KEY WITNESS [I do love that the Film Forum dug up this Phil Karlson gem—G.K.] and THE SONS OF KATIE ELDER

March 10-11 Thurs/Fri

THE AMERICAN FRIEND and REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

March 12,13,14 Sat/Sun/Mon

OUT OF THE BLUE and BLUE VELVET

March 15 Tues

TRACKS and RIVER'S EDGE

March 16-17 Weds/Thurs

NIGHT TIDE, QUEEN OF BLOOD and HIGH AIR (a Screen Director's Playhouse television episode from 1955)

...and for one week, March 18-24, the New York premiere of Altman's  O.C. AND STIGGS

I believe someone remarked as the lights came up at the end of THE LAST MOVIE, "Nice try, Dennis!" At the time most folks still held the film in complete contempt but very possibly, if there was to be any kind of turnaround on LAST MOVIE's reputation, this retrospective was as good a place as any to start, if only because no one had been able to see the darn thing in years. Hopper was enjoying a renewed popularity as BLUE VELVET was then a strong midnight attraction, and pairing it with his own OUT OF THE BLUE made for a very fitting, if extremely uncomfortable, double bill.

Trickle-up aesthetics

Boy, today's New York Times Magazine is quite the feast of putative conundrums. First and foremost there's the cover story on musician M.I.A., who's so thoroughly full of it that even Lynn Hirschberg can call her on it; and man, that's saying something. (The whole package, which includes a "portfolio" by bad-boy photog Ryan McGinley, is so rote in its posturing that one starts to feel thoroughly trapped within a culture whose only function is to perpetuate its self-parody.) It's true that as full-of-it types go, M.I.A. (whose records I largely like very much, by the way) is a more interesting case than most. Complacently perpetuating the Bronfman lineage while making pronouncements along the lines of "Give war a chance;" well, that sort of thing takes some stones, if not a head full of rocks. Late in the profile Hirschberg chides the Romain-Gary-Gavras-directed video for M.I.A.'s song "Born Free" as being "at best, politically naive;" more predictably, she fails to note, likely because she failed to glean, that it's a limp (expanded gore notwithstanding) homage to Peter Watkins' 1970 film Punishment Park, which I wrote about here. Which brings up the question: if you make a homage and nobody notices, is it still a homage, or is it just a rip-off?

"But you noticed, Glenn," I can hear some of my kinder readers saying, and I thank you for that, but let's face facts: I don't count. In another piece in the same issue, Virginia Heffernan holds forth on "web music videos" that "find pleasure in prohibition" and rhapsodizes over the Beyoncé video for "Why Don't You Love Me?" and its internet propagation: "...lest anyone think video commenters are all just semi-literate masturbators, consider how scholarly things get: 'This is a homage to Bettie Page,' one commenter declared, pointing readers to a vintage Page video..."   Oh, sigh. It brought me back to a time not so long ago when the fact of even having heard of Bettie Page would have made someone like Ms. Heffernan consider you to be, well, a semi-literate masturbator. Pointing out that the model for the character of Bettie in Dave Stevens' terrific The Rocketeer comic book and its subsequent not-so-terrific movie adaptations, in which Jennifer Connelly portrayed the character, earned one the designation "drooler" rather than "scholar." I understand for a fact that the late, great Mr. Stevens (who died of leukemia in 2008) was oft-subjected to some dubiously raised eyebrows on account of his Page enthusiasms. Page-knowledge still has some occult appeal: "For enlightenment about the video, I e-mailed its director, Melina Matsoukas. Beyoncé, she explained, wanted to create a video inspired by Bettie Page movies 'without telling anyone—not her label, not her management, not anyone.' They chose the right medium. Online video always seems as if it's going behind the backs of managers and labels; the story of a video's creation complements its scrappy aesthetic."

Yeah, sure thing. (I bet Beyoncé told her stylist she was making this video.) I rather gape at the notion that in this day and age adapting the style of a Bettie Page loop is somehow seen as a legitimately subversive act. But I'm more irritated that the mainstream dismisses the people who do the actual cultural heavy lifting as lepers and the ones who appropriate the results of their research as visionaries. Like this is a new thing. Maybe I should just get over it. 

In any event, this sort of thing doesn't always fill me with resentment; sometimes it opens me up a bit. A few years back, in one of its "fashion issues," Premiere ran a short chat with the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik about his inspirations, particularly his cinematic ones, and he cited Luis Buñuel. Big deal, you may think, pretty much anybody who's taken a film appreciation course or seen the first half of Belle de Jour knows the director had a foot fetish that makes Tarantino look like a hobbyist. And you'd be right. But Blahnik cited what was then a pretty obscure Buñuel film—his 1964 version of Diary of a Chambermaid, still at the time a few years from its Criterion DVD release. And he cited a specific scene, the one in which the haute-bourgeois paterfamilias has Jeanne Moreau's character try on a particular pair of small boots. Right on. And somehow the through-line from Buñuel to Blahnik to Carrie Bradshaw was something I found ironically pleasing, as if someone was getting away with something. Or other. 

"Wild" by default

Budding anarchist Sterling Holloway with Ulrike Meinhof precursors Rochelle Hudson and Dorothy Coonan in WIld Boys of the Road.

Because I could not stop for death...no, actually, because I could not compose a Topics, etc. post excoriating the coverage of this year's Cannes Film Festival that didn't royally irritate my editor, I instead opted to concoct an analysis of William Wellman's 1933 Wild Boys of the Road. I know, because that's the logical alternative, right? Well, such is my character, and my character has no logic. At The Daily Notebook, as it has always been.

On not reviewing "Sex and the City 2"

...it's not as if the zeigeisty observer in this critter isn't sorely tempted, and more than mildly curious. On the one hand, I'm a SATC hater from way back, despite the fact that the series provided my pal Allison Anders with much-desired employment back in the day, and did similar favors for talents such as Nicole Holofcener, Martha Coolidge, Alison McLean, and Susan Seidelman. And apparently this new one, in which duh gals bring their flaunt-it fabulousness ("fabulousness" strictly putative) to Abu Dhabi and create all kinds of scandale, pushes some intriguing buttons. Stephen Farber, while liking the picture overall, tut-tuts about its "anti-Muslim" content in his Hollywood Reporter review, finger-wagging at a scene in which "a bunch of Muslim women...strip off their black robes to reveal the stylish Western outfits they are concealing beneath their discreet garb." One's response...I should say, my response, really...to all this is a little ambivalent. On the one hand, I think, tell it to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Farber. And on the other hand, you know what's really anti-Muslim? Bombing the shit out of countries containing lots of Muslims. And again, when someone like Jeffrey Wells condemns the likes of this movie by referring to it as a Taliban recruitment tool, or some such, he's really putting the cart before the horse. As if Western sexual libertinism is the sole raison d'etre for Muslim extremism. That's kind of a breathtaking combo of self-congratulation and historical ignorance. 

So it seems that the movie might well offer "stuff," as some call it, to chew on. And on the other hand, A.O. Scott's review of the picture in today's Times seems to bear out a suspicion that I was nursing. When he mentions how much older one might feel after sitting through it, and describes one early sequence as not only  "desperate, grating, and a little sad" but as a "harbinger of what is to come," that spells things out: who gives a rat's tail what buttons the thing is pushing if the thing itself is so very awfully tired?

Adding more weight to that side of things is the fact that the damn movie's almost two-and-a-half hours long, which means a nearly four-hour hell multiplex experience is required for me to see the damn thing. And right now I haven't got the time-time, as Lou Reed would say. So it'll have to wait for the DVD, as the first one did. Remember that one?  With its shocking reverse-cowgirl Cynthia Nixon shot that messed up the afternoons of several SCR readers who had grown accustomed to this being a consistent SFW site? Ah, fun times. 

Department of no surprises

To T.C.

Because Halloween weekend is very nearly upon us, National Review Online contributor John J. Miller recommends a few of his preferred ghost stories, one of them being Nabokov's "The Vane Sisters." Quoth Miller:  "The ending is fiendishly clever. It's also a trick. I missed it completely and discovered its true meaning by reading around the interwebs." Yeah, I bet he did. One rather feels like sucking one's gums a bit before launching into a diatribe of what it was like to read Nabokov before there were any interwebs, non?

Later on Miller's list: A yarn by Andrew Klavan. Lunch at Tour d'Argent, dinner at KFC.

Image of the day, 5/26/10

Got alienation? 

From Antonioni's 1964 Red Desert, of course; grabbed off of the standard-def version of the new Criterion edition, which will also be on Blu-ray. Screen capture courtesy of the new CD/DVD drive installed to my computer by the fine and fast fellows at The Mac Support Store, a real godsend for Brooklyn-based Mac users who are like to have a stroke at the prospect of hauling their desktop over to Manhattan's TekServe. Anyway, they got the job done beautifully, and in what seemed the blink of an eye. As for price, well, with Mac stuff it is what it is, and even taking that into consideration I hardly feel ripped off. Still, it was an unanticipated expense that impels me to sheepishly mention that there's a tip jar module in the right column of this blog. And let me thank, by the way, the wonderful folks who've already thrown some coin in there; the consideration is much appreciated.

Posting will be on the light-ish side heading into the holiday weekend, in part due to the holiday weekend, in part due to Other Professional Demands, and in part due to the bigger-than-I-had-anticipated (and I anticipated pretty big) job of doing this site's first ever Blu-ray Consumer Guide. Which I hope to unveil by this time next week.

UPDATE: The particular qualities of the above image worry our friend David Hare, who in comments confesses to being "terrified" that Criterion applied "a whole lot of digital cleanup" to the film, which displays plenty of what we aficionados call "good grain" in the BFI-issued edition. As I said, I haven't looked at the Criterion Desert entire, nor done a side-by-side comparison with the other version, but here's another screen cap from later in the same scene that I hope gives David a little bit of an answer:

Knock the rock

 

Bad sex, bad drugs, and not-so-hot music (despite the aural presence of Comus, actually a pretty distinctive art-folk combo of the era); that's what 1970's  Permissive is made of. Also bad hair and bad clothes. And incredibly bad manners, particularly for British people. Funsy! This interesting bummer of a release from the ever-inventive Flipside arm of the fabulous BFI DVD and Blu-ray division is the subject of this week's Foreign Region DVD Report, now tan, rested and ready for love after a Cannes hiatus. At The Daily Notebook. 

"Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace" by David Lipsky

I should of course begin by admitting that I approached the very existence of this book with an irritation that some might intuit, or even insist, was born of resentment. "Really, David Lipsky?" I thought when I read the announcement of the publishing deal that would result in this book, said announcement, I thought, coming a little too opportunistically soon after David Foster Wallace's September 2008 suicide. "Do you really need to be doing this?" Lipsky was/is a star journalist whose fortunes have hardly begun to even peak, and among his achievements was/is one of the better post-mortem features to about Wallace and the circumstances leading up to his death, but again, my feeling was, does this need to happen, and does it need to happen so quickly?

My feelings were strong enough that I resolved, in that thoroughly reasonable and even-handed way of mine, that I would never even go near the book once it came out. Still, I leafed through a copy at a bookstore, and was simultaneously gratified and also kind of smugly confirmed in my prejudices (at least for the moment) to see that the majority of the book was in Wallace's voice; the thing seemed to be a very long transcription of the conversations Lipsky and Wallace had over five days on the last leg of the promotional tour for Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, for a Rolling Stone piece that, not unusually given Jann Wenner's caprices, never ran in that publication. But Tom Bissell, a great writer and a friend, who had also been a friend of Dave's and was thoroughly shatttered by Dave's death, told me on a visit to New York that he had picked up Lipsky's book at the airport and that, yeah, his own provisional misgivings aside, he was glad it existed, because Lipsky was in fact writing it from a good place, and because it did indeed capture Dave's conversational voice. Anothe recommendation from another friend sealed things, and I picked up the book for real.

And was almost instantaneously peeved: "I'd been assigned to write about David, I was sitting at a party, when a friend plopped down next to me on the sofa. 'Poor David Foster Wallace,' she said. 'It's not his fault, this kind of attention, it's weird, it can be hard to synthesize unless you're very strong. Meanwhile, all these relationships are being screwed up by David Foster Wallace.' She flicked her face to people at the compass points of the room. 'All these men—because they secretly want to be David Foster Wallace—they flip out whenever he's in the paper. All the girls are like 'David Foster Wallace, he's really cool.' So the guys are like 'I hate David Foster Wallace. Every anxious writer I know is obsessed with him, because he did what they wanted to do.'" I shudder again as I input those words, and think again, good Christ, I am so glad that Lipsky and I only have a relative few friends in common, first off, and secondly, it was precisely never to have to even deal with the possibility of interacting with such horrible assholes that Dave made it a point to stay away from New York City as much as possible as the years went on. And yet. And yet that anecdote is a perfectly telling tidbit about an atmosphere that was very real at that early point in 1996. I was certainly, crushingly aware of it in the summer of that year when I was told that I was gonna be put in charge of shepherding Dave's piece on David Lynch home. 

The category error of John Nolte

Applying bumper stickers, wearing "Factor gear," attending "rallies," and dropping conversational non sequiturs about listening to Glenn Beck do not demonstrate that one is a conservative. They demonstrate that one is a dink. Like John Nolte. 

The Current Cinema

In which I find the "MacGruber" movie, MacGruber, well, pretty fucking funny. And review it, at MSN Movies.