Some Came Running

"Being Flynn" and nothingness

Okay, the movie's not THAT bad. But it does slice the balls right off of Nick Flynn's excellent book Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, and yes, I know Flynn's an executive producer on this and no, I don't begrudge him a goddamn thing. My review for MSN Movies is here. One thing I didn't get to complain about in my review is how every damn movie depicting a twelve-step program meeting invariably bathes whatever room in question in sickly green flourescent light, right before invariably commencing an entirely perfunctory montage showing that Recovering Addicts Come From All Walks Of Life And Isn't That Wonderful. 

"Choke," not just a novel by Chuck Palahniuk anymore

My instant (sort of) Best and Worst of the Oscars, for MSN Movies. 

Erland Josephson, 1923-2012

In Nostalghia, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983.

David Hudson's MUBI Notebook entry leads to several worthwhile considerations of the great, great actor. 

The auteur is present

Last night, the 25th of February, was a big night in the big town, culture-wise. Bjork was doing her "Biophilia" show at Roseland. Philip Glass and his ensemble gave a perhaps not-to-be-repeated-in-this-lifetime performance of his amazing three-hour-plus work, Music In Twelve Parts (the Glass equivalent of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier or Young's Well-Tuned Piano, essentially), at the Park Avenue Armory. And over at Lincoln Center, there was a special screening of Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret, after which Lonergan and select cast members spoke of the shot-years-ago critical cause celebre. Jaime Christley, one of the most crucial of the film's champions, was there (I was at the Glass concert myself, which was SO AMAZING), and he tweeted later that Lonergan himself chastised a viewer who was loudly crinkling a candy wrapper during a crucial scene. This reminded me of a couple of things, chiefly of Frans Liebkind saying "You are ze audience, I am ze author, I OUTRANK you." Although I imagine that the candy-wrapper crinkler wasn't aware at the time that he was being shushed by the director.

Back in 1987 I was working at Video Review magazine, and some time during my then-one-year tenure there I had been introduced to the work of director Andy Sidaris. Sidaris was then the king of more or less direct-to-video T&A action movies, which invariably featured super-busty former Playmates awkwardly carrying guns and taking on drug-dealing bad guys so pockmarked they made Robert Davi look like a Proactiv spokesmodel. The movies were invariably ruthless in keeping their female leads as frequently topless as possible; it seemed these fetching freelance investigators were constitutionally incapable of discussing the day's events without explicitly stating that it would be best to do so naked, in the hot tub, and then taking action to make it happen. Never any lesbian action, though; Sidaris pictures were also kind of ruthlessly hetero-normative, as they say. 

They were also, it might go without saying, entirely ridiculous, and risible. So when a bunch of the Video Review guys, most of us in our highly glib twenties, were invited to an actual screening of a new Sidaris picture, which I believe was Hard Ticket to Hawaii, pictured above, to be followed by a press dinner at a deli across the street with the director himself, we were all over that. It was at a small screening room on Park Avenue, and there wasn't enough room in a single row for our entire party to fit, so I sat one in from the aisle in the row behind my boys...and about 40 minutes or so into the movie, which we had been wisecracking and giggling at MST3K style for the whole time, an older gentleman of Greek extraction took the seat on the aisle, next to mine.

It was Andy Sidaris. And he did not understand what was so funny. "Cool it guys," he addressed the row in front of him. Looking at me, he asked, "What are they laughing at?" I actually felt kind of bad, and shrugged. "The big twist is coming up," he said with some enthusiasm.  You have to give Sidaris this: in addition to copious enormous boobies, his fast-moving films were packed with explosions, action, and, um, plot twists. I think the one in Hard Ticket involved a giant cheap fake animatronic cobra emerging from an exploded toilet. Nothing funny about that. 

Fortunately it was dark enough in the theater that Sidaris could not later identify the party of gigglers, and he amiably regaled my colleagues and I with tales of his days shooting professional sports, and how he had directed all of the football sequences in M*A*S*H, and what a no-talent prick sonofabitch Robert Altman was. 

Now for the funny part. In the fall of 2001, I'm in the same screening room, in the same row, in the same seat, about to see a pre-release, pre-New York Film Festival screening of The Royal Tenenbaums. This is the cut that ends with the Anthology recording of The Beatles' "I'm Looking Through You," and it's always bugged the crap out of me that that music had to be changed for the release. In any event, who comes along and takes the aisle seat next to me but Wes Anderson. 

"This is really weird," I said to Anderson. "I've only ever sat directly next to a director at a screening of his film once before, and it was in this same screening room, and I was sitting in this same seat."

"Who was the director?" Wes asked me.

"Andy Sidaris."

"Who?"

I began to explain, but then the lights went down.

That's a pretty far-out lingo you're talking, but I think I can infra dig where you're coming from

I consider it slightly odd that a film website as august as Moving Image Source would devote so much space to a consideration of Ross Douthat, a young triple-dealing conservative shill whose only lasting contribution to cultural and political discourse is the coinage of the phrase "chunky Reese Witherspoon." But MIS contributor Tom McCormack has given the matter of Douthat some thought, and while he drops a few howlers along the way ("Douthat has an impressive knowledge of American cinema that stretches all the way back to the 1970s," holy shit!), he winds up making the case he wants to make, so good for him. And his final point, which is that Douthat is, well, a triple-dealing conservative shill who's so full of shit that he can commend the depiction of the cardboard commies in Red Dawn and then turn around and tsk-tsk the terribly nuance-lacking portrait of Spanish fascism in Pan's Labyrinth is, while hardly surprising, or anything but self-evident, correct. And if you think Douthat's bad in this category, try reading the guy on birth control some time. 

Anyway, the passage in McCormack's piece that gave me somewhat more considerable pause was this one: "Douthat's most significant talent, though, isn't verbal dexterity but his ability to draw out a movie's underlying ideology. This is a rare gambit among journalist film critics. With the exception of Armond White and J. Hoberman, most film critics consider it oddly infra dig to mention politics too directly, as if doing so might sully their prose with the grime of cultural studies departments."

Well. Given that Douthat's movie-reviewing largely occurs in National Review, and that "Hollyweird Is Leftist" is pretty much an article of faith in those parts, the tenor of his readings hardly surprises. And I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that from what I can glean, many if not most of the other film critics working professionally today locate their politics somewhere to the left of Douthat's. But I rather doubt that they don't mention politics too directly because they consider it beneath their dignity. I think they avoid it largely because it's boring. Or, rather, because it would be boring, or it would get boring. 

Before I explain why, let me first look at the two other critics McCormack cites. J. Hoberman is, of course, a critic I revere and a human bring I admire. His particular approach draws on ideological investigation, a breadth of aesthetic knowledge, a playful enthusiasm for making disparate connections, and a wry, engaged sense of humor; he weaves all these elements together with a genuine sophistication. While he deeply deplores genuine cruelty, he would never stoop to the genuinely naive fake outrage that Douthat whips out when considering the Hostel films. As for White, he is easily disposed of; his politics and his readings of film politics are incoherent, dribblingly neurotic bordering on the lunatic; just another channel for his never-ending stream of personal resentments. 

To my mind the greatest politically-inclined critic was the late Robin Wood, who was unstinting and unsparing in pointing out how not only movies but movie critics were in some sense enslaved to the dominant ideology. The fulminations of the Big Hollywood idiots notwithstanding, almost 100 percent of mainstream film product does, in some crucial respect, if not serve, than at least pay fealty to the dominant ideology. Most professional film critics are employed by companies/institutions whose very existence is, in some way, reliant on the upholding of the dominant ideology. I understand that there's at least one juicy academic paper to be written on the new film Wanderlust, to which I link to my review below. The movie genially lampoons communal life without any thought-out examination of the actual reasons why it might be "better" than the urban rat race its characters are trying to escape from. Its resolution involves a kind of balancing act between two "competing" modes of life that in actuality cannot exist in tandem. It's a fairy tale.

I didn't get into this too thoroughly in my review not because I thought it would be "infra dig" for me to do so. It was because, first off, I don't have unlimited space; second off, or close to first off, having seen the film on a Tuesday evening and needing to file in order for the review to post on a Thursday, I didn't have time to work out my observations about this into a satisfactorily cogent form. And third off, for the purposes of both the audience I'm addressing and my making a living, the observation is kind of beside the point. I don't wanna go "we are all prostitutes" on y'all, because that's not what I believe, but I do believe that I'm working in a system that's in a sense the definition of the dominant ideology. The dominant ideology is our water, so to speak. Douthat, whose conservatism is at odds not just with the post-modern but the modern, can choose to ignore the fact that a particular wrinkle in the dominant ideology of late capitalism is precisely what enables the deviations from conservatism that he finds so objectionable; this is one of the ways he gets to be triple-dealing. For those of us on a different end of the spectrum, digging too deep into the dominant ideology would get pretty damn tedious. I try to imagine what my life would be like if I spent it, say, pointing out how hetero-normative almost EVERYTHING was. You see what I'm saying. And the other reason is, of course, that there's a limit to how much I'm REALLY interested in rocking the boat. Douthat can "rock" the boat all he wants; his masters/allies own it, after all. 

Five frames from "Terrorizers," Edward Yang, 1986

With Cora Miao.

I am the fly

Wanderlust reviewed, for MSN Movies.

"Singin' in the Rain:" its "attitude" toward silent cinema

I understand that everyone's kind of sick of yammering on about the relative assets and liabilities of The Artist, but I have to admit that one not-unpleasant sidebar of all the yammering is that Singin' in the Rain tends to get brought up a lot. And if there's one thing I enjoy thinking about, it's the 1952 film co-directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen and scripted by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. 

However. What is actually kind of weird, if not actually unpleasant, about this sidebar is that, aside from one single solitary thematic point of comparison, I'm largely convinced that the two films have, if you'll pardon the vulgar turn of phrase, sweet fuckall to do with each other. Yes, The Artist and Singin' in the Rain are "about" the transitional phase from silent to sound in Hollywood history. And. That. Is. It. I consider the point so not-open-to-debate that I don't intend to dwell on it, and anybody who wants to take issue with me might want to wait until The Artist comes out on DVD, and watch it on a double feature with Singin' in the Rain, and then report back to me on The Direct Experience of such a viewing.(My conviction is that most viewers will recognize Singin' in the Rain as the complete multifaceted masterpiece of a Composed Film that it actually is, and The Artist as, at best, "nice.")  What I will dwell on, briefly, is an odd thing I've heard from some Artist boosters, which is that the Michel Hazanavicius film is actually more "respectful" of silent cinema than was/is Singin' in the Rain.

After all—I've heard the argument go—Singin' itself depicts silent-film acting as broad, exaggerated, hammy, and the makers of the films as ego-and-revenue obsessive near-hacks, not artists.  This is in fact largely the case, and so what. There's a big aspect to Singin' in the Rain that partakes of self-parody, which is somewhat distinct from pastiche. Comden and Green, we may recall, got their start in at least semi-satirical sketch comedy; they, with Judy Holliday and Leonard Bernstein and others, were founders of The Revuers, a troupe that sent up the show biz of their day and before, in a tradition that was followed by outfits as diverse as the SCTVers and the creators of Forbidden Broadway. That is to say, the mockery of tradition/convention was entirely within the bounds of another, not unrelated tradition/convention. While the movie has a great deal of fun not just with silent cinema tropes but also the technical difficulties involved with the transition to sound, it also (unselfconsciously) situates itself within a particular continuum. Most of the comic stylings provided by the almost-literally-born-in-a-trunk former vaudvillean Donald O'Conner in the Kelly/Donen film would not be at all out of place in any non-talking Sennett or Roach short. The joking on silent cinema in Singin' in the Rain is "inside" in the very best sense of the term, while the condition of The Artist is one of near-complete alienation from silent cinema. 

One more thing, unfortunately. In a piece about The Artist for the L.A. Weekly, Karina Longworth writes: "​Like Singin' in the Rain, a film to which it's often compared, The Artist is an example of the kind of mythic history Hollywood tells about itself in order to promote its own survival in times of trouble." This, despite the quasi-ass-covering qualification "an example," is a bit of an overreach, I'm afraid. Singin' in the Rain came into being because Arthur Freed thought, for reasons I'm disinclined to speculate on, that it would be swell to have a bunch of songs he wrote a couple of decades before to be featured in a brand new feature film. That a masterpiece in the form of an Old Hollywood fable happened to coalesce around that notion is, I believe, merely some sort of a happy accident. "When Rain was released in 1952," Longworth continues, "studios were struggling to adapt to both a 1948 court order that forced the studios to give up ownership and management of movie theaters, and the growing lure of television." Yes, while I look for a copy editor, I shall allow that the assertion there is sort of true, but I think the movie you're thinking of is The Robe, which is a slightly different mythic history. In CinemaScope.  

"Some Came Running" never makes money for its partners

This year MSN Movies decided to give its readers a fighting chance and, instead of letting me do Oscar predictions alone, had me compete and converse with my buddy Glenn Whipp. You should enjoy our observations, and take his advice. And be patient with the gallery. We made it for YOU. 

"The Black Book" versus "Reign of Terror"

Who says this blog is afraid to answer the tough questions, to boldly tackle the really burning issues of the day?

To wit: Given that VCI Entertainment issued a not-all-that bad DVD version of Anthony Mann's delightful French Revolution pop-noir 1948 Reign of Terror AKA The Black Book, is the new version of the Mann film recently released by the burn-on-demand Sony subsidiary Columbia Classics worth a look, let alone an investment of 20 bucks or thereabouts?

Well, we've delved into the question and the answer is, HELL YEAH.

The relative enthusiasm with which the VCI release was met with beck in 2008 was of course relative to the fact that prior video iterations of the film looked like sock puppet theater, on account of their being quasi-bootlegs of the title which had fallen into the slough of despond known as public domain. The VCI version was made from undeniably soft materials, but transferred with care. If the magnificent chiaroscuros concocted by Mann and his most crucial collaborator, cinematographer John Alton, were clearly not all that they could be, well, they were enough to extrapolate from. Given the state of affairs concerning the film's provenance and such, DVD Beaver reviewers Gregory Meshman and Gary W. Tooze said of the release, "This may be as good as it gets."

This was of course before the burn-on-demand DVD marketing scheme got going. My suspicion is that some cinephile at Sony knew that the studio had some very superior materials in the vault, and that the only way to get them released would be through just such a corporate sidebar as was pioneered by the Warner Archive. Alas, Jeanine Basinger's otherwise quite thorough Mann biography doesn't go into how Reign of Terror got its name changed to The Black Book, but I suspect it was retitled after the independent low-budget production was picked up for distribution by Columbia.

In any event, the difference between the VCI Reign and the Columbia Classics Book is stark from the very opening montage, including this introductory shot of Richard Basehart's "Don't call me Max" Robespierre. The VCI version is the first, the Sony the second. 

VCI.

Sony.

The extent to which the materials used for the VCI edition are washed out is extremely evident in the flames, and behind the flames. The level of relative detail is plainly discernable in details such as Basehart's teeth.

As for the light and shadow—and most importantly, darkness, Alton's stock-in-trade and likely a great influence on the future work of Gordon Willis—well, see these screen caps from a slightly later scene showing the first secret meeting between the characters played by Robert Cummings and Arlene Dahl:

VCI.

Sony.

"The movie represents a total triumph of form over content—or, perhaps, form over lack of content," Basinger notes. It's impossible, really, to fully appreciate the form unless it's presented faithfully, or well, or whatever your preferred term. Though the Columbia Classics disc is a DVR, it's made from a mighty fine master. I can just imagine what kind of a Blu-ray the materials might yield, and I bet I'm GONNA have to imagine that for the forseeable future. Am I gonna toss my VCI disc? No, because it also contains a good version of ANOTHER Alton-shot (albeit not Mann-directed) genre picture, The Amazing Mr. X, starring Turhan Bey, WTFIU, and because the Reign presentation also has a good and informative audio commentary by Alan Rode, who's joined by Arlene Dahl. (Hmm. I forget whether that commentary goes into the specifics of the name switch, but never mind.) But when I just want to watch Mann's film—and I'll probably want to at least every other Bastille Day or so—the Columbia Classics one, which you can indeed buy through the Warner Archive or through ClassicFlix and no doubt other outlets, is the one I'll pop into the player.